It’s not pretty when several irrational ideas collide. On May 12, the Senate conducted a hearing to discuss the removal of a $2 billion per year tax break for the top five oil companies. The New York Timescalled the testimony at the hearing “a big whine for big oil.” Eliminating a tax break like this should be a no-brainer, but that idea is blocked by six irrational notions from the right that come together in an explosion of false logic:

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) claims that “unsustainable debt and deficits threaten the prosperity of our children and the health and retirement security of our seniors,” but yet …

Stopping a tax increase, no matter what kind of tax, is economic priority No. 1. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said that “all this hearing is about is providing a justification for tax increases.”

The conservative media pundits argue that an increase in taxes paid by the hugely profitable oil companies would raise the price of oil. So …

For many conservatives, the answer to our oil problem is “drill, baby, drill,” the implication being that drilling for more oil within the U.S. would lead to lower gas prices. Therefore …

If we drill for more oil, we’ll find oceans of it! The right-wing pundits say that we have enough oil to live happily ever after. If you need more of something, it will magically appear. And finally …

If we don’t get oil prices down, civilization will collapse because civilization is not possible without oil.

Let’s give these ideas a reality check.

First, as many at the Roosevelt Institute have argued, fiscal deficits are not the biggest problem we face right now. Our priority ought to be digging ourselves out of the hole that the global financial industry has placed us in. Many countries currently have deficits much bigger than ours, and the U.S. has had much bigger ones in its history. And in any case, the way to address a huge deficit is to follow smart fiscal policies that focus on reigniting the economic growth engine that then creates enough jobs to provide the revenues the government needs. Sort of like what FDR did in the Depression.

That leads us to irrational idea No. 2: that you can’t raise taxes for anybody, especially not Big Business and billionaires. In reality, one way to reignite economic growth is to take economic resources from those who have them and aren’t using them particularly wisely — like the oil companies, financial industry, and wealthy top 1 percent of the population — and use them to invest in things that rebuild the economy, infrastructure, a decent school system, or a manufacturing economy. Tax increases are a very bad thing in a recession for the bottom 90 percent or so of the population because they would dampen spending, which makes economic activity decline even further. But as Keynes showed in his classic book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the rich don’t tend to spend as much of their money as the rest of us (their marginal rate of consumption is lower), and their lack of spending makes things worse in an economic downturn. So tax increases for the top of the economic pyramid is a good idea.

Which leads us to the wacky world of oil. The notion that denying an oil company a few billion in profits would lead to a rise in prices is demonstrably wrong, as the Congressional Research Service has proven. But worse is the idea that drilling for a few billion more barrels in the United States’ already depleted oil zones would have much of an effect on prices. If you manage to increase the amount of oil produced in the U.S., most of that oil will actually go to other countries because the oil market is global. The U.S. uses about 21 percent of the world’s oil supply and produces about 8 percent. This means that we can’t buy our oil in some fantasy America-only market. (See figures from the BP Energy Review [PDF].) In fact, if you want to increase the supply of oil, you might want to, say, help the Iraqis fix their oil infrastructure (alas, we’ve already wasted hundreds of billions on a war over there). Bottom line: the U.S. has become a small player on the global oil scene because it has already used up most of its oil — it only has about 2 percent of the world’s proven reserves.

Moving on to the next irrational idea conservatives are pushing, we come to the belief that somehow oil is forever, like diamonds. Well, petroleum is a finite resource, created over 100 million years ago, and is not replenishable. According to quite a few well-versed scholars and engineers, we have hit the halfway point in our siphoning of the global oil tank. This theory of peak oil was initially explained by the renowned oil engineer, M. King Hubbert, who predicted in 1956 that the U.S. would peak in oil output in 1970, which turned out to be accurate. He then predicted that global oil output would peak in 2000. And guess what? Global oil output, at least of the easy, cheap oil, peaked in about 2005.

But this message doesn’t seem to get through on the right. Since the decline and eventual end of the use of oil would lead to a shift from our car-centered, single-family-home-and-mall-centered lifestyle, the usual reaction to the idea of peak oil has been to stick one’s head in the sand. Many people simply can’t imagine a world that doesn’t run on oil. But we are innovative creatures and we could take up the challenge of building a different kind of society. For instance, I have argued that we can have a completely electric transportation system — and transportation accounts for about three-quarters of all oil use!

Since conservatives tend to do well in suburbs and in the South — and suburbs and the South run on oil — the Republican party will not even countenance the possibility of less oil being available for all of our cars, trucks, and planes. (Not that the Democrats are much better, but at least some of them support electric rail.) And so it seems that a perfectly rational idea — eliminating a tax deduction for oil companies swimming in profits they can’t use — doesn’t seem to have a chance in Congress. Why? Because according to conservatives, the deficit will destroy the economy; taxes will destroy the economy by bringing higher gas prices; drilling more is the only way to bring down prices; there will always be more oil; and if there isn’t more oil … the economy will really be destroyed. Ka-boom!

And there you have it: the sound of the collision of a half dozen irrational arguments.

I was sad to hear that you will no longer be writing for the op-ed page of the New York Times. Your critical perspective on the class war being waged against the middle and working class and the poor, on the waste and recklessness of our wars, and on the wrenching struggles of ordinary Americans made you an invaluable voice. But I want to suggest that even more important than those insights was your consistent attempts to point to a better future, and the path to getting there, by rebuilding our infrastructure. I hope that in your forthcoming book you make that effort a substantial part of your argument.

For instance, back in 2009 you declared that “America has to be rebuilt, modernized and re-energized — from its water and sewer systems to its schools to the smart grid and the alternative energy sources that so many are talking about and beyond. That’s where the jobs are for the long term, and that’s the only route to a truly flourishing future.” You went on to say that “These investments would be costly and require vision.”

Well, you can’t single-handedly pay for the cost, but you have started to create the vision: “Imagine … an America with rebuilt, healthy, dynamic metropolitan areas, and gleaming new port facilities, and networks of high-speed rail, an America with electric vehicles and a smart grid and energy generated by the power of the sun and wind and water and the ocean’s waves. Imagine if the children of today’s toddlers had access to world-class public schools all across the nation and a higher education system that is both first-rate and affordable.”

I submit to you that the ills that you so eloquently address will not be healed without a clear vision, one based on a new, sustainable, job-creating infrastructure. Maybe the word “infrastructure” doesn’t stir the soul; Rachel Maddow tries, but she seems to have a wistful look on her face, as if to say — and she sometimes admits — “I wish I could make the infrastructure more interesting for you.” Now, to me it’s fascinating, but apparently I am in the small minority. However, I think that part of the attraction of discussing high-speed rail or networks of wind farms or walkable neighborhoods is that they literally create an image in the reader’s or viewer’s head.

But there is an even deeper need for infrastructure renewal to which you have alluded, as when you wrote that “A long-term program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure … would create jobs and establish a sound industrial platform for 21st-century industries. The transformation to a greener economy needs to be accelerated, and most of the manufacturing associated with that newer, greener economy should take place in the United States.” As I argue in my book, Manufacturing Green Prosperity, the way to build a strong economy in the long-term is to rebuild the manufacturing sector, and the way to rebuild the manufacturing sector is to build an environmentally sustainable infrastructure. The two can be joined, hand in hand, if we create the right set of policies.

And as you point out, “Think of the returns the nation reaped from its investments in the interstate highway system, the Land Grant colleges, rural electrification, the Erie and Panama canals, the transcontinental railroad, the technology that led to the Internet, the Apollo program, the G.I. bill.” The government can and must be a force for good in society — that is, if the population has a choice of candidates who will do the right thing. You wrote of how China is moving full speed ahead, how John Kennedy used the presidency to create a vision of the future, of how first steps like an infrastructure bank can help lead to a needed turnaround.

Finally, I urge you to consider putting forth these principles as a first step in constructing a new kind of economics, as intimidating as that may sound. The ideas you are talking about are actually complementary to much of neoclassical economics, even if many economists might not see it that way. What conventional economists are not good at is what you, and others like you, are good at — understanding the need for good jobs for everyone, the role of a modern and well-maintained infrastructure, for a manufacturing base that can provide millions of jobs, and for a government that has a constructive role to play. These should be touchstones for, as you sum up in your last column, “expand[ing] my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.” I wish you luck!

Filed under: Business & Technology, Cities, Green Jobs, Infrastructure, Politics]]>http://grist.org/infrastructure/2011-03-29-bob-herbert-savvy-advocacy-missed/feed/0Herbert.jpgBob HerbertLesson from Japan: We don’t need nuclear power to solve the climate crisishttp://grist.org/renewable-energy/2011-03-20-lesson-from-japan-we-dont-need-nuclear-power-to-solve-climate/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/renewable-energy/2011-03-20-lesson-from-japan-we-dont-need-nuclear-power-to-solve-climate/#commentsSun, 20 Mar 2011 22:46:26 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-20-lesson-from-japan-we-dont-need-nuclear-power-to-solve-climate/]]>Anyone watching the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan can see: The human and ecological costs of nuclear power far outweigh those of any renewable energy.Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

On March 14, an editorial in The New York Timesstated, “This page has endorsed nuclear power as one tool to head off global warming. We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it will remain a valuable tool.” I want to argue that, to the contrary, the lesson to be learned from the catastrophe in Japan is that nuclear power is not even part of a sustainable solution to global warming. The whole idea behind preventing global warming is to protect the Earth’s ecosystems, collectively known as the biosphere. You can’t save the biosphere if it’s irradiated. The same problem rears its ugly head with most biofuels, certainly with corn ethanol; it won’t matter if the climate isn’t changing if the planet has been turned into one big desert because the soils and fresh water have been destroyed.

Speaking of water, the reactors that are melting down were supposed to be of a superior design, “light water” reactors, the “light” making it sound easier on the environment. But it turned out that unless you use (and abuse) prodigious amounts of circulating water, the whole system implodes. When the effects of global warming kick in and sea levels rise and erratic rainfall leads to unforeseen downpours or extended droughts, more sequences of rare events will lead to more nuclear power disasters.

Why is it worth potentially losing a region of a country, or even a whole country, just to generate electricity? What happens if a cloud of radiation heads for Tokyo, or moves into Korea? Why do we even have to worry about this?

I am not advocating the immediate closure of all nuclear power plants. All of the plants on or near earthquake faults, or on a coastline, should probably be considered for early retirement. I am advocating that no more nuclear power plants should be built.

Besides the painful facts of ongoing meltdowns, nuclear power plants don’t need to be built because truly renewable, or perhaps more descriptively, fuelless electricity technologies, like wind, are far superior to nuclear energy. The key to a sustainable energy supply is that there be no fuels. The fuels we currently use are oil, coal, gas, plant matter, and … uranium. The key characteristic about fuels is that we obtain energy from them by burning them, making them explode, letting them radiate — that is, they create great amounts of heat.

Now, burning a fuel is very attractive because you can obtain large amounts of energy. It’s easy to concentrate. The problem is that burning something is inherently dirty and wasteful. Electric power plants that use fuel waste about two-thirds of their energy, heat that simply dissipates into the environment. Think about that — the allegedly high-tech world of fossil fuels and nuclear power is wasting way over half of its fuel. The third problem with fuels is that they run out, as oil is starting to do.

Coal plants are very destructive to human health, certainly more on a day-by-day basis than nuclear plants, because of the mercury and other pollutants that go up the smokestack. And then, of course, there is the carbon dioxide. About 60 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions come from fossil fuels. The nuclear power industry also creates carbon emissions, because of all the mining, transportation, and construction surrounding its use. But it emits less carbon than do fossil fuels. The problem, clearly, is that every decade or so a significant part of the Earth’s surface is threatened with irradiation. Again, not a solution.

Wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro (water) energy of various sorts have no fuel. They convert a source of energy into electricity, using machinery. The source of energy is basically unlimited. There is no pollution or carbon dioxide (although classic hydropower, in the form of dams, can wreak havoc on ecosystems and emit carbon dioxide when organic matter putrefies in their artificial lakes). Although renewable energy technologies also waste most of the energy going through them, this waste is not in the form of heat.

Heat waste is what is destroying the nuclear power plants at Fukishima, and this phenomenon is the result of an overly complex system. Charles Perrow wrote a book called Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies way back in 1984. Recently, there has been a good deal of interesting work on the idea of resiliency, that is, the capacity of a system, whether an ecosystem or a society, to withstand mistakes or problems or failures (for example, see the book The Upside of Down by Thomas Homer-Dixon). Resilient systems don’t produce as much as nonresilient, or brittle, systems, at least in the short term — but in the long-term, resilient systems are much more effective and useful because they don’t collapse. And when something collapses, like a nuclear reactor, at best it stops being useful and at worst it becomes extremely destructive.

Brittle systems can look more productive in the short-run, because often they are using themselves up and destroying their surrounding ecosystems in the process. Another way to look at it is that they are capital-destroying. For instance, agriculture can achieve fantastic levels of output for a while, but it can destroy the soil and water on which it depends, as shown by David Montgomery in his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.

In the case of nuclear power, in the long-term, there is probably nothing more expensive, because the nuclear waste — such as the “spent fuel rods” that at the time of this writing are burning and spewing radioactive gas — has to be taken care of for hundreds or even thousands of years. And then there is the occasional country or region that is destroyed. And uranium mining does the same thing, at a smaller scale. That is, if the costs of nuclear power are averaged over a few thousand years, it will turn out to be the most expensive energy ever produced.

You may see erudite and sophisticated debates about whether wind, nuclear, or coal are more expensive in terms of kilowatts of electricity or kilowatt hours. But these costs can never include the cost of a collapse of a country, region, or entire civilization.

The ultimate irony of nuclear power may be that it is totally dependent on government intervention in the economy, and yet conservative Republicans are its greatest boosters. Because it can destroy whole regions, only the government has the capacity to clean up the mess, not private insurance companies. When it comes to energy, Republicans are hardcore socialists. They advocate for subsidies for fossil fuel companies, for the use of the military to protect oil trading lanes and oil deposits, for insurance for nuclear power, and for research and development for all of them.

Governments have always been behind nuclear power, and by now the industry has become thoroughly entangled with huge private firms like General Electric and Tokyo Electric Power. The political economic inertia, built up over 60 years, is on autopilot — or maybe the cooling system has malfunctioned, whichever technical metaphor you prefer. Utilities bandwagon with a “sure” thing, something that has been done dozens or hundreds of times before, like coal plants or light-water reactors. But wind installations are expanding exponentially. Even the short-term costs of wind and large solar farms is approaching coal in the short-term, and the costs of nuclear plants are expanding at the same rate, kept alive by subsidies from socialists like the Republican Party.

Let us hope that Fukishima’s greatest damage is to the nuclear power industry, and not to Japan and the surrounding regions. And let us hope that nuclear energy is never, ever again, included in a list of clean energies. Nuclear power is over — long live renewable energy!

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Energy Policy, Politics, Renewable Energy, Solar Power, Wind Power]]>http://grist.org/renewable-energy/2011-03-20-lesson-from-japan-we-dont-need-nuclear-power-to-solve-climate/feed/0nuclear-power-plant.jpgnuclear power plantHow we can save environmentalism — and ourselveshttp://grist.org/article/2011-03-13-how-we-can-save-environmentalism-and-ourselves/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/2011-03-13-how-we-can-save-environmentalism-and-ourselves/#commentsSun, 13 Mar 2011 23:43:14 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-13-how-we-can-save-environmentalism-and-ourselves/]]>Can somebody throw a line?Photo: AKZOphotoThis is part two of a two-part series, cross-posted from New Deal 2.0. You can read part one here.

In my first post, I started to discuss a speech by the founders of the Breakthrough Institute, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (N and S). In this post, I will discuss their presentation of 12 theses of environmental thought, which they hope will supply “underlying assumptions for a new, post-environmental climate movement.”

1. They start off by claiming that “more, better, or louder climate science will not drive the transformation of the global energy economy.” If this is true, it is indeed tragic. What they seem to be saying is that the public cannot, or will not, deal with a complicated scientific topic, and worse, in my opinion, this public will not be very worried about our long-term future. I do agree with the broad theme of their alternative: appeal to medium-term self-interest, because I think it is eminently possible to tackle global warming by improving people’s lives in that time frame.

2. They advise that “we need to stop trying to scare the pants off of the American public. Doing so has demonstrably backfired.” I’m not sure about this one, partly because I don’t think it’s really been tried. There surely haven’t been any scare campaigns on display recently. And I don’t know how you can show that a few scientists talking about the very real possibility of massive ecological collapse has made much of an impact — unfortunately.

However, they make a point: If you are going to frighten people, you better have a very easy-to-understand and clear set of ideas about how to get out of danger. Humans seem to operate at a high level exactly when they are in danger and there is a clear way out — probably the result of the evolutionary need to do things like escape from lions. But when only fear is used to push your cause, all kinds of unfortunate stresses on the system result, often backfiring and leading to the rise of right-wing political moments. It’s the remedies that have been in short supply so far.

3. N and S argue that “the most successful actions will not be justified for environmental reasons … We should put shared solutions at the center of our politics, not our view of the science.” They use the examples of linking environmental concerns to national security and economic well-being. I would go further and talk about how to build clean infrastructure and thereby reignite the manufacturing engine of growth. Also, solutions to global warming are applicable to addressing the end of the era of cheap oil and the problems associated with collapsing ecosystems and agriculture.

4. N and S don’t think that we should be talking about changing behavior, that the alleged environmentalist consensus to “stop crass consumerism, live in denser cities, and use public transit” will not go over well among most of the world’s population, who live in cities anyway. We can’t expect the world’s population to want to stay mired in less resource-intensive poverty for the sake of preventing global warming.

However, it’s not poor people jammed into megacities that are causing most of the emissions, its rich countries spread out in suburbs and sprawl. But to carry their point to a logical conclusion, it is the refusal of the rich countries to change that will be the deal breaker. And even if by some miracle the rich cut back their profligate ways, “More and more of the world will adopt the very living patterns that greens have so long valorized. And as they do they will use vastly more energy and resources, not less.” Well, then I guess we’re really screwed.

So what is the possible route out? As we shall see, N and S argue that technological innovation is the only answer, because otherwise, they seem to imply, the situation is indeed hopeless.

5. N and S argue that “we have to stop treating climate change as if it were a traditional pollution problem” by using regulation, because the technologies don’t exist to move to a less carbon-emitting world. Implying that solar and wind are not up to the task, they state that a solution to climate change “will require us to rebuild the entire global energy system with technologies that we mostly don’t have today in any form that could conceivably scale to meet that challenge.” But the history of the rollout of electricity and oil were once where renewable energy technologies are now — just starting an exponential take-off. However, their point remains, that we can’t just stop something — fossil fuel emissions — and expect the market to automatically come up with a better alternative.

6. They claim that “We will not regulate or price our way to a clean energy economy” and “Greens have, in recent years, substituted the almighty Market, in the form of a response to a carbon price signal, for their past faith in command and control regulations.” Amen, although I think regulations can go further than they do because technologies do exist that could be used in an effective regulatory environment. And I would also add that public construction is an alternative to trying to develop new technologies (both can happen at the same time).

7. They claim that “we need to acknowledge that the so-called ‘soft energy path’ is a dead end,” where we can meet energy needs through renewable sources and efficiency. There are actually situations in which making or using things more efficiently leads to an increase in the use of a resource (called Jevons’ Paradox). But if resources are recyclable and energy is renewable, that paradox wouldn’t be a big problem.

There has been quite a bit of work done showing that it is possible to generate all of our energy using solar, wind, geothermal, and water energy. I have made the argument, as has Lester Brown, and Greenpeace and others have done impressive studies. N and S call for much more R&D, which should include more money for understanding how current technologies can create a sustainable society now.

8. N and S warn that “we will not internalize the full costs of fossil fuels, even if we are able to agree upon what they actually are.” For instance, some studies claim that gasoline should cost $12 per gallon if all of the health, military, and other effects were accounted for. Judging by the reaction to the oil price spike in the 2008 campaign — drill, baby, drill — I think it unlikely that Americans will accept vastly steeper gasoline and electricity prices.

9. All of the foregoing leads to the conclusion that “There will be no significant action to address global warming, no meaningful caps or other regulatory frameworks, and no global agreement to limit emissions until the alternatives to fossil fuels are much better and cheaper.” I’m not sure where N and S stand on the issue of whether this is the end of the era of cheap oil, that is, that the production of oil is peaking (“peak oil”). Natural gas and coal also have their supply problems; they will not last forever and in fact could become quite problematic in the next decade or so. So if renewables are too expensive now, when fossil fuels become even more expensive, we are in for a bad time.

There is an alternative — use our great wealth, at least while we still have it, to construct a sustainable energy, transportation, and urban infrastructure. We put over one trillion dollars per year into a military system that is, at best, mostly a waste of resources, and we just bailed out a financial system that has run amok. We can certainly afford to build millions of wind turbines and solar panels, even if they are currently more expensive than coal and oil.

10. N and S claim that “There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.” One could just as easily say that there is no credible path with nuclear power. They have repeatedly stated that renewable energy is impractical. Now they propose an unheard-of expansion of a technology that is much more difficult to construct, constantly runs over-budget, is dependent on a fuel strewn all over the world, and has a host of other problems, like waste disposal, that appear to be insoluble. More research, preferably in different but related technologies like thorium and fusion? Sure. Uranium? 50 years and billions of dollars in R&D is probably enough time and money for a technology to work out its problems.

11. “We will need to embrace again the role of the state as a direct provider of public goods … virtually the entire history of American industrialization and technological innovation is the story of government investments in the development and commercialization of new technologies.” Yes!!

So why is the environmental movement almost completely clueless on this point? Part of it is a reaction to Reagan and the ensuing conservative movement; part of it is the legitimate suspicion of a state apparatus that has made huge missteps (like pushing ethanol); part of it is an understandable desire for decentralized institutions that are more amenable to democratic control. My counterargument is that government is the only institution that can prevent our civilization from suffering the same fate as the Titanic, as difficult as it will be to turn government around from its current course. State-as-builder should at least be one of the options on the table.

12. Finally, I must say they seem to completely cut any ties to the environmental movement with this one: “The solution to the ecological crises wrought by modernity, technology, and progress will be more modernity, technology, and progress. The solutions to the ecological challenges faced by a planet of 6 billion going on 9 billion will not be decentralized energy technologies like solar panels, small scale organic agriculture, and a drawing of unenforceable boundaries around what remains of our ecological inheritance … [the solution] will be: large central station power technologies … further intensification of industrial scale agriculture … and a whole suite of new agricultural, desalinization, and other technologies.” Environmental activists used to call this a “technological fix” — the idea that you can keep the same basic system if only you can replace one technology with another, without redesigning the system as a whole.

Of course, this raises the question of whether technologies will ever be discovered that will allow us to simply pop a new engine into cars, or replace that dirty coal plant with something else. That would be the ideal solution; otherwise, a certain amount of civilizational redesign will be necessary.

But why put all our eggs in a basket that doesn’t even exist yet? I am all for technological innovation, but I don’t want to bet the future of the world’s species on it. At the other extreme, the chances of various technologies coming to fruition are exceedingly small, and therefore maybe we should ignore innovation and get going on what we have now. Or we could cover both bets, by starting seriously — that is, by spending trillions — to rebuild our infrastructure while feverishly researching and developing everything that looks reasonable.

For N and S, “The choice that humanity faces is not whether to constrain our growth, development, and aspirations, or die. It is whether we will continue to innovate and accelerate technological progress in order to thrive.” I wish us luck. But just in case that doesn’t work, I think it’s worthwhile trying to figure out how we could consciously, and with great forethought and democratic participation, start rebuilding civilization right now. An environmentalism based on carbon pricing may be dead, but I’m not worried about the death of environmentalism. I’m worried about the death of the biosphere.

Filed under: Climate & Energy, Climate Change, Politics]]>http://grist.org/article/2011-03-13-how-we-can-save-environmentalism-and-ourselves/feed/0life-preserver-flickr-AKZOphoto.jpglife preserverIs environmentalism still dead?http://grist.org/article/2011-03-12-is-environmentalism-still-dead/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/2011-03-12-is-environmentalism-still-dead/#commentsSun, 13 Mar 2011 04:15:17 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-12-is-environmentalism-still-dead/]]>Sign of the times?Photo: Benny LinThis is part one of a two-part series, cross-posted from New Deal 2.0. You can read part two here.

In 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism” that shook the environmental community — although probably not quite enough. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (N and S) have gone on to form The Breakthrough Institute, arguing that we need technological breakthroughs in order to solve our biggest environmental problem, global warming, as well as advocating for what they see as innovative solutions to various other problems.

They recently gave a follow-up speech at Yale, addressing the epochal questions, “What went wrong with the environmental movement in the past 10 years or so, and what new direction should we take?” I’ve always been interested in what they have to say because I think they have contributed several important new ideas, even though I disagree with some of them. Their critique, at least, presents an opportunity to engage in a meaningful debate about environmental movements and policies. And they serve as a foil for me to pontificate about my own ideas.

N and S start their speech by recalling the genesis of the “Death of Environmentalism,” because, as they say, “Not one of the environmental leaders we interviewed articulated a compelling vision or strategy for dealing with the challenge” of climate change. The environmental movement, broadly defined, was focused — no, obsessed, with — cap-and-trade. In fact, it still is. I have to agree with N and S on this one: The fascination with cap-and-trade has been, perhaps tragically, wrong-headed. If cap-and-trade killed environmentalism, then it is still dead.

It pains me to criticize not just cap-and-trade legislation, but carbon pricing in general (which includes carbon taxes, generally considered an alternative). So much of the energy of the environmental movement is caught up in carbon pricing, and it has spent so many resources, so much time, and so much, as N and S point out, “political capital,” that it is heartbreaking to criticize the sincere work of so many people. The sense I get from my contacts and interaction in the environmental movement — and I include my time blogging for Grist — is that the overwhelming majority of environmentalists think that cap-and-trade (again, including carbon taxes) is the only realistic policy for tackling global warming in time to do anything about it.

This stubbornness is the curse of what John Kenneth Galbraith identified 50 years ago as “conventional wisdom” — that is, a large public spends a considerable amount of time and energy understanding and constructing a self-reinforcing set of ideas, and this group of people is loath to give up their hard-won understanding and consensus. Like a scientific paradigm, people can use this conventional wisdom as a basis for further discussion without going back over first principles and main tenets every time they want to discuss something. This makes policy-making more “efficient,” but can put the group adhering to this set of ideas into a kind of death grip — thus the “death of environmentalism.”

There was another subject matter of N and S’s original essay that I found very important, one that is always difficult for any “single issue” movement, which is this: At some point, it is almost impossible for an agenda to move forward unless that agenda is linked to others. One classic example of this is the path of Martin Luther King, who saw that African Americans, and poor people in general, were never going to thrive economically unless other issues were addressed, such as the struggle of workers to unionize — the effort he was engaged in when he was assassinated — or the resources wasted by a the society that was immersed in the Vietnam War and militarization. It is extremely difficult for movements to move out of the confines of the path in which they have been at least partly successful. The union movement has had the same problem, culminating in the threats to its existence in Wisconsin and elsewhere (the challenge of which will hopefully re-orient the labor movement to a wider embrace of public issues).

In my opinion, we could have had our “Martin Luther King” moment when Al Gore was at the pinnacle of his publicity, after he won the Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize. He had the opportunity to move beyond the same-old-same-old, but instead he gathered $300 million dollars to use in commercials, a strategy I criticized at the time, because he could have much more profitably used that money to organize at the grassroots level. Then he joined a venture capital firm and now he has virtually disappeared from public view.

I’m not saying Gore did not accomplish some very important things, simply that he missed a bigger opportunity. He remained stuck in the conventional wisdom of a carbon price, as did most of the rest of the environmental movement. N and S perhaps lay a little too much emphasis on this grand strategic mistake — the conservative movement and corporate control of government in this country has had a huge impact, for instance. N and S list 12 theses of how to move out of this mess, but before listing them, I’d like to get back to the broader picture of what constitutes successful environmental policy.

The environmental movement was born insisting on regulation — clean up the air and water, prevent companies from polluting, block the rape of the Earth. This regulatory strategy was actually very successful. It would have been a much better way to prevent global warming than the carbon pricing strategy, because we could have just legislated something to the effect that we have to get our electricity and transportation from progressively cleaner and cleaner sources, without the spaghetti logic of carbon pricing.

But there are also limits to regulation. How do you re-center a transportation system on electric trains, instead of cars, trucks, and airplanes, with regulation? The answer is: you can’t. You can’t do it with carbon pricing, either. It requires something that was an integral part of governmental efforts to build the nation, from Lincoln to the New Deal to Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System — that is, the direct intervention of the government into the economy by building infrastructure.

N and S go part of the way toward a government-directed rebuilding program — they advocate for a very large public investment in technological research in the hopes that we can innovate ourselves out of this mess. Politically, it’s much more appealing than carbon pricing, for the simple reason that when you talk about spending money to create something that would make peoples’ lives better, it’s an easier sell than the idea that somehow making things more expensive will make things better — or will prevent things from getting really bad. So N and S are advocating for public investment, which environmentalists have treated as a secondary goal.

There was a slight burst of enthusiasm for “green jobs” on the part of the environmental and labor movements, which N and S see as another failure of environmentalism. The problem was and continues to be that a serious effort to create green jobs and a greener economy requires what the other global centers of manufacturing, Europe, Japan and China, have done. That is, it is necessary to create an industrial policy. The government has intervened, and continues to intervene, in a massive way in those economies to build a new set of industries. Contrary to N and S’s assertion that the green collar sector is low tech, green industries in other manufacturing countries, such as high-speed rail and wind turbines, are very high-tech. After all, the clear economic lesson of the New Deal and World War II is that during an economic downturn, the government should spend more than it takes in. By pursuing an industrial policy that encourages the creation and expansion of cutting-edge industries, like wind and high-speed rail, we could learn from the short-term Keynesian lessons of the New Deal while at the same time increasing the long-term competitiveness of the United States. It would be a win-win policy.

Recently Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize-winning economist and senior fellow and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute, gave a very interesting speech in South Africa concerning climate change and the global economy. He argued that by implementing policies that help to reverse global warming, we can also reverse the global economic downturn. Although he also pointed out many barriers to doing so, he outlined some interesting policy proposals.

For me, the most interesting part of his speech concerned the use of a Keynesian approach, not just for a single country, as is usually done, but for the entire world economy. John Maynard Keynes pointed out that when the private sector is unable to generate enough demand in the economy, that is, it is unable generate enough spending from consumption and investment, then the government must step in to kickstart spending. Thus in recessions and depressions many now acknowledge that at some point it may be necessary for the government to spend more than it takes in to get the economy moving again. (See numerous articles from Marshall Auerback on this basic idea.)

There are a couple of fine points to what Keynes was saying, however, that are either often glossed over or challenged. First, he asserted that when demand is low, saving can get in the way of recovery. So — and this is the part that is ignored — since the rich save more than the poor, their excess income gets in the way of recovery. The horrendous implication, from the rich person’s point of view, is that they should be taxed more. The less direct way to put this, which is the way it is discussed even in much of the progressive media, is that an “unequal distribution of wealth” leads to negative economic outcomes. The important statistic for the U.S. is that while in 1970 the top 1 percent of households pulled in about 10 percent of total income, now they receive close to 25 percent. Not good, from a purely Keynesian perspective.

So what does this have to do with climate change? Since he was speaking in South Africa, it was easy for him to point out that the world distribution of wealth is very unequal. Because of this inequality, it will be much harder for developing countries to create less carbon-intensive economies through large-scale investment than for developed countries. In addition, the poorer countries consume more and the richer countries save more. So an obvious policy approach is to tax financial transactions, which moves money from something that (to be charitable) involves savings into consumption and investment by developing countries. The richer countries could also simply give grants to the poorer countries. Stiglitz claimed that about $200 billion per year would be required to help developing countries make the transition to a less carbon-intensive future, which could be financed from a financial tax.

The second implication of Keynes’ ideas is that the economy needs more investment when it is in a downturn. We certainly need a good deal of investment to create less carbon-intensive economies, and it so happens that, according to Keynes, investment, particularly in factories, is the best way to pull economies out of slumps. While he famously suggested that digging holes and filling them up again would also do the trick, he clearly preferred doing something useful with investments on the grounds that investment is generally good for a society and that it is a surer way to speed recovery than consumption.

Stiglitz argued that what we have now is an inadequate level of global aggregate demand, which is to say, there isn’t enough consumption and investment for the entire global economy to pull out of the recession. Thus, he stressed, reversing climate change is an opportunity for the economy, not a drag. We need investment for the good of the climate and we need investment for the good of the economy — therefore what we have is a win-win situation.

But how do we encourage investment? Stiglitz’s answer is to put a price on the emission of carbon, thus stimulating investment into less carbon-intensive technologies. He thinks that eventually carbon will be priced at 80 dollars per ton, which means that it will probably be cheaper to build a wind farm than to build a coal plant. In fact, it might become more economically rational, with a price on carbon, to shut down an existing coal plant and build a new wind farm to replace it. And new wind farms mean new investment, which means increasing global aggregate demand, which means pulling out of the global recession.

Of course, there are roadblocks in the way of this process. For one thing, there is the power of the greatest emitters of carbon, the oil and coal industries, among others. Then there is the expense that a price on carbon would mean for poorer countries — thus the need for the richer part of the world to subsidize the poorer part. Even rich countries, of course, would not take easily to a price for carbon, as we saw in last year’s defeat of lukewarm cap-and-trade legislation. Stiglitz argues that for an international treaty to be effective, it needs to have enforceable sanctions, such as hitting the offending nation’s exports with a price increase. But as the managing editor of South Africa’s largest newspaper argued in a generally favorable response to Stiglitz’s lecture, trade sanctions would mean that developing countries would be hurt, thus requiring some more subsidies in order to equalize the playing field.

In all, I think Stiglitz laid out the foundation of a very workable global economic strategy. I would propose another element: encouraging direct investment and construction of infrastructure on the part of governments. While Stiglitz mentioned the idea of regulation and praised mass transit as an adjunct to the general policy of pricing carbon, it was not a focus of his approach. But here is another possibility for a win-win — if developed countries sold or gave factories to the developing countries to create the wind turbines, electric rail and cars, and solar plants that would allow them to reduce carbon emissions, it would give the developed countries a huge boost economically and the developing countries the capability to become much wealthier in a sustainable way. Think of it as a global Marshall Plan or Works Progress Administration. The developed countries could promise, say, $1 trillion per year in machinery to the developing countries, which would be a strategic, targeted, Keynesian method for pulling the entire world economy out of its slump. And it would go far to meet what Stiglitz called the greatest challenge we have ever faced: the threat of global clima
te change.

When the Roosevelt Administration designed the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), it was designed as a set of mutually self-reinforcing parts, as a holistic system — including electrification, flood control, soil conservation, fertilizer production, and plenty of good, long-term jobs. The same concept of mutual gain applies to renewable energy — at a regional, and even national level, an economy running on solar, wind, and geothermal energy would constitute a system, creating more than the sum of its parts.

By building dams, the TVA both controlled floods and provided electricity. By teaching farmers about soil erosion and good soil conservation practices, rains stopped turning into the floods that occur when soil is poorly maintained. By controlling floods, agriculture became more dependable, and it became possible to set up industries such as fertilizer manufacture, whose output was then used to strengthen the farming economy. With a strong farming system, the commercial sector expanded, using the electricity provided by the dams — which were made more reliable because there was less flooding. These relationships are examples of positive feedback loops, that is, by increasing something (like electricity) you increase something else (like manufacturing) that then loops back to increase the first set of factors (in this case, by enriching the region).

In just the same way, by designing a national wind, solar, and geothermal system, the benefits of each individual piece of equipment are increased, and those benefits reverberate within the wider economy, looping back to support the renewable system. One of the common criticisms of renewable energy is that it is intermittent — that is, the wind doesn’t always blow, and at night the sun doesn’t shine. However, as Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University has been arguing, since the wind is always blowing someplace in the continental United States, if you design a regional or even national system that places wind turbines in areas with different wind patterns, the output of power becomes reliable. In fact, an interconnected system could provide at least 33 percent of a wind system as baseload power, that is, you would be confident that at least one third of your power needs were provided for by wind, a function now filled by coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy.

But wind could be just one part of a national renewable energy system. Concentrated solar power (CSP), uses large arrays of mirrors (mostly in the desert) to concentrate energy on a tower that then creates steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. The big advantage of CSP is that it can store much of this heat in things like molten salt. At night the CSP plant can use that heat to continue to generate electricity. As Joe Romm points out in an article about CSP, “Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States.” Paired with an Interstate Wind System, the benefits would probably increase — by the time the stored heat in a CSP ran out, it would be late enough at night that the wind system could provide all of the remaining electric needs of the country.

There are other storage technologies that could banish intermittency. The sodium-sulfur battery, which can be the size of a house, could be used to store excess energy if too much wind is blowing, or to store electricity for times when the wind isn’t blowing enough. There are newer sodium-sulfur batteries that are more appropriate for storage at the building level, adding a whole new level of flexibility to a national renewable system.

Now add solar panels and solar hot water heaters on top of buildings to the national design. Make those buildings more and more energy-sipping by retrofitting them to retain heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, and we make the system even more resilient. Solar panels and hot water heaters are most efficient at the height of the day, when air conditioning needs often bog down an entire electric system (and can sometimes lead to blackouts). Much of the current electric system is composed of what is known as peak load generators, usually fueled by natural gas. By using solar panels and hot water heaters, and insulating buildings, we could eventually replace “peak” generators — but only if decentralized building energy systems are combined with a national system, one centered on technologies such as wind and CSP.

Building-based geothermal energy can also add to the virtuous cycles within a renewable energy system. The least well-known clean energy source, geothermal heat pumps (GHP), use the fact that the temperature of the ground, even 10 feet deep, stays at a constant temperature of 50 to 60 degrees throughout the year. Since heating the air and water in buildings uses about one-third of both our electricity and natural gas, and since coal-fired plants provide 50 percent of our electricity, we could shut down all of our coal plants simply by installing GHPs under all of our buildings to fulfill their heating and cooling needs.

But of course we don’t have to rely on any single renewable technology to make our electrical system carbon-and-pollution-free. The beauty of wind, solar, and geothermal, used together, is that each one complements the other. Wind can provide a baseload, constant supply, while geothermal heat pumps and solar water heaters can decrease the need for that baseload power. CSP can help in the most energy-intensive part of the day, while solar panels and efficient buildings can be used to take the “peak” out of “peak power”. Large batteries and CSP heat storage can be used to smooth out any remaining problems with intermittency.

Obviously, we have a challenging political environment, to say the least. Roosevelt wanted to establish an entire network of regional authorities around the country, modeled on the TVA, and he couldn’t prevail in Congress. But we have to start somewhere, and the place to start is to at least understand and have a public conversation about the potentialities of a holistic, renewable electricity system. I’d bet that wide public interest in a program that would generate millions of new, good jobs, and provide reliable clean electricity, would be something that could change political calculations in a hurry.

Americans have always been known to have a “can-do” spirit. During the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration tried out many different programs to confront the Great Depression and to spread rural electrification and support agriculture. Nowadays, however, much of the political spectrum seems to have turned to a “can’t do” spirit.

The sequence is often the following: Left-of-center ideas are proposed to solve some long-term, gigantic problem. The Right says that the government can’t implement the idea because if the market had liked the idea it would have happened, and since the market didn’t do it … it can’t be done. The center-right looks at the world as it currently is, notes the Right’s reaction to the Left, and then, with furrowed-brow and a studied look of being “realistic,” announces that the progressives proposals are … can’t do.

A prime example of this “realistic” impulse can be found on display in an article by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, entitled “Goodbye, Bullet Trains and Wind Mills.” Even though high-speed rail and wind farms are expanding at prodigious rates around the globe, in the U.S., it’s all “no we can’t.” While it would take a longer article than his to challenge all of Lind’s factual inaccuracies, let me concentrate on a few of the larger errors of his ways.

First, he invents the strawmen of “greens” who hate cars, and “urbanists” who despise suburbs, who have somehow hijacked that repository of caution and timidity, the Democratic Party. In real “reality,” most greens live in suburbs and drive cars, simply because most Americans do.

In my experience, environmentalists are scared to even mention alternatives to car travel, lest potential supporters run away in panic. Anybody who dares to raise a voice for designing walkable neighborhoods does so in the most hushed tones. Besides James Howard Kunstler, I’m not sure who Lind is talking about (Disclosure: I don’t have a driver’s license and I prefer Manhattan-style neighborhoods).

Meanwhile, the allegedly brainwashed Democratic Party continues to support many times more funding for highways than for transit, continuing the trend between 1978 and 1999 when half of all transportation money went to highways, and 15 percent to rail and transit; meanwhile, one of the few items in Obama’s 2011 budget that declines is funding for rail.

Second, Lind argues that because we don’t currently have high-speed rail and a significant percentage of our electricity generated from wind power, it won’t ever happen. What would he have said in 1900? There were 4,000 cars made that year, and 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Now we have about 250 million cars and 4,000 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

In the 1950s and 1960s, we spent over $400 billion in current dollars to construct probably the largest “socialist” project in world history, the Interstate Highway System. The U.S. High-Speed Rail Association estimates that it would cost about $600 billion to build a 17,000 mile system in 20 years. The same sum would build a large chunk of a continent-spanning wind network that would take advantage of the fact that wind is always blowing somewhere. We spent decades and trillions of dollars building the suburbs; why can’t we do the same to build up dense, walkable cities and towns? Why is something possible in the past, but not in the future?

Third, Lind proposes an alternative — more of the same. More nuclear power plants, more highways for more trucks, more airports, more asphalt and concrete, more natural gas, and apparently, more sprawl (Lind’s colleague at New America Foundation, the oil expert Lisa Margonelli, doesn’t do much better).

Since Lind dissed rail by proclaiming that it is oh-so-19th century, it might surprise readers to know that the most recent development in transportation technology has been high-speed rail. Cars and trucks predate diesel locomotives; electrified freight rail is more than 10 times more efficient than trucks. An efficient car wastes 99 percent of its energy, using only 1 percent to actually move the human occupants. And Lind doesn’t even consider looming, permanent price increases in oil as it becomes harder and harder to find more oil — even in places one mile under the Gulf of Mexico.

However, I agree with Lind in one area — we need “more government spending for years to come,” and “massive public investment in infrastructure that increases long-term U.S. economic growth.” That’s exactly what a multi-trillion dollar, multi-decade program of building high-speed rail, intra-city rail such as trolleys and subways, wind farms across the country and off-shore, and myriad other renewable energy and rail-based projects, would accomplish. These systems use all parts of the core of a modern industrial system — machine tools, semiconductors, high-skill labor, advanced materials, cutting-edge engineering, and more.

I like to think that if the New Dealers were around today, they would agree that we can do it, yes we can!

Filed under: Cities, Climate & Energy, Living, Politics]]>http://grist.org/article/2010-06-28-the-new-american-cant-do-spirit/feed/0seattle_rail_flickr_leelefever.jpgLight railEvery job can be green, part threehttp://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-three1/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-three1/#commentsWed, 22 Apr 2009 03:00:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-three1/]]>This is the third and last installment of my chapter, “Green jobs in a sustainable economy,”, published recently in the book “Mandate for Change”. You can read part one and part two, in which I discuss the first six out of eight ways in which to create an environmentally sustainable economy.

Seventh, the global agricultural system is coming unglued. The days of transporting food over thousands of miles, of dousing soils with pesticides and artificial fertilizers, and of growing thousands of acres of the same crop, will soon draw to a close. Millions of new urban gardening jobs could be created within cities and suburbs in order to produce most of our fruits and vegetables, and most grain could be grown close to urban areas. This kind of agriculture will build up the soil, which is the natural capital of our farming system, instead of letting it be destroyed and washed away (two examples of sustainable agricultural practices are permaculture and bio-intensive gardening).

A soil-enhancing, pesticide- and artificial fertilizer-free agriculture would be much more labor-intensive than the current system. Industrial agriculture is only productive because of the indiscriminate use of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. Organic, intensive agriculture is more productive in terms of land, but requires high skill levels and more labor.

Training Institutes could help new gardener/farmers to produce healthy, sustainable food, and the Bank could be used to help them set up a new garden/farm. The American agricultural workforce could balloon from the current 1 million to many millions, making it one of the most effective green-collar jobs possible.

Agriculture, like transportation, building construction and energy, could stop being a source of crisis and start becoming a source of sustainability.

Eighth, our economy teeters on the edge of a cliff, at least partly caused by the decline of the manufacturing sector. But the various programs advocated in this chapter all rely on a healthy manufacturing sector to produce the trains, wind turbines, solar panels, zero emission buildings, organic gardens and more that are needed to decrease carbon emissions and avoid the wholesale destruction of the biosphere. Thus, in order to create a sustainable society and guarantee our economic well-being, it is imperative that the federal government act to support the revival of the manufacturing sector.

The Infrastructure Capital Development Bank could include a national system of manufacturing extension services, which would help start and expand manufacturing firms to provide the sinews of the green economy. The extension services could also start an epochal shift, from manufacturing which uses up the Earth’s resources and pollutes our ecosystems, to a manufacturing system that is “cradle to cradle“—that is, that uses recycled materials and creates zero pollution. If this shift happens, all manufacturing, for the first time in human history, could be sustainable and all manufacturing workers would be blue-green-collar.

Manufacturing is not simply a source of jobs, it is a critical part of any prosperous society. Even the capacity to trade for manufactured goods requires a thriving manufacturing sector. According to the WTO[PDF], only 20 percent of the trade among the regions of the world is in services; the rest is in merchandise. So, even though 65 percent of the U.S. economy is part of the nongovernmental service economy, most of that output cannot be traded for foreign manufacturing goods. Indeed, the U.S. trade deficit that threatens the value of the dollar cannot be closed unless manufacturing activity is increased.

This imbalance occurs because services usually involve the act of using manufactured goods, which can only be done on-site. Thus, a solar panel is installed and maintained by service personnel; a salesperson might sell the panel to the homeowner after he/she saw an advertisement; a trucker might bring the panel to the home after various office services such as accounting have been involved. All of these services added together might yield many more jobs and much more economic activity than the manufacture of the solar panels in the first place. But the services are all dependent on the manufactured solar panels, and technological advances in the manufacture of the solar panels can have large effects on the employment possibilities of the industry.

Manufacturing the solar panels also brings about the need for services at various stages of the production process, such as in research, design and marketing. Most importantly, however, the solar panels themselves are built with parts that have been produced using industrial machinery. These various kinds of industrial machinery, such as machine tools or silicon-purification equipment, have their own “ecosystems” of services and manufacturing attached to them. And this industrial machinery has a unique aspect: It can be used for all manufacturing industries, which in their turn spawn the rest of the services that make up the economy.

Thus, manufacturing solar panels not only makes the various service jobs such as installation possible, it also provides a market for the very core of the economic ecosystem: The various industrial machineries that in turn are used to produce the goods and services that power the entire economy.

Now consider how this process takes place when making wind turbines, trains, building materials, geothermal heat pumps or gardening tools. Not only are the millions of service jobs associated with these technologies expanded as green industries grow, the entire industrial machinery core of the system could be rebuilt in the United States. This provides a short-term boost to the economy, but more importantly, it creates the long-term foundation of economic reconstruction that can help rebuild the middle class, move people out of poverty and create a prosperous society for the foreseeable future.

In sum, a green-collar jobs program can achieve a carbon-free inter-city and intra-city transportation system supported by walkable urbanism, a carbon-free energy system based on buildings, metropolitan areas and a national grid, and a sustainable agricultural and manufacturing system. New federal policies can move us, now, in the direction of a society in which all jobs are green-collar.

Posted in Business & Technology ]]>http://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-three1/feed/0Fast action on climate changehttp://grist.org/article/fast-action-on-climate-change/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/fast-action-on-climate-change/#commentsMon, 20 Apr 2009 09:03:02 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/fast-action-on-climate-change/]]>This is a guest post from Ted Glick, a long-time progressive and climate activist. More information and contact information can be found at tedglick.com

Tomorrow, April 20th, I and over 200 other people around the country and from several countries will be fasting. We’ll be doing so to make a statement that it is long overdue that this country gets on the right side, gives concrete leadership, to the wide and deep clean energy revolution that is absolutely essential, and soon, if we’re to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

We’re doing this tomorrow because this is the day that the U.S. Congress returns from its spring recess. This week hearings will begin on a recently-released draft piece of climate legislation, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” in the key House Energy and Commerce Committee chaired by Henry Waxman. Over the next month it is expected that this committee will amend and vote on a final bill to send to the full House, which will then likely vote on it in June.

Why 25-40 days or more? Because we want to call attention to the need for the U.S. and other industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 (35-50% below today’s levels). This is a target adopted by climate negotiators from the nations of the world at a United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia in December, 2007. It is a target that, if reached, would give the world some chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Our other major demands are for a moratorium on the building of any new coal plants and that there should be no giveaways to polluters in the climate legislation being drafted. As President Obama called for in his campaign and in his budget proposal to Congress less than two months ago, 100% of the permits to pollute under a carbon cap must be auctioned, or a substantial carbon fee must be enacted, to ensure that the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, efficiency and earth-friendly lifestyles happens rapidly.

In the context of what the world’s scientists are telling us about what is happening to our natural environment, these are not radical demands. They could be criticized as not being strong enough. I have heard from several people, for example, asking why we are not calling for what Al Gore has put forward: 100% clean electricity in the USA, essentially renewables, within 10 years, by 2018.

I love this demand, and there’s no question in my mind that it could be done if the political will to get it done existed within the U.S., particularly within the White House and Congress. But we’re nowhere close to that right now. Right now, Big Oil and King Coal have tremendous influence over Congress, at the same time that our newly-elected President continues to talk about “clean coal” as if it actually exists, which it doesn’t and never will.

We can see the polluters’ power by what is happening with the 648-page “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” Although there are certainly good parts to this bill, particularly its provisions in support of renewable energy, energy efficiency and taking action to prevent deforestation, there are a lot of bad parts. Chief among them is the provision for a tremendous number of problematic offsets. “Offsets” are how polluters can continue polluting while giving some financial support to supposed clean energy or energy efficiency projects somewhere else in the world other than where their own company is polluting. Experience with offsets within the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union carbon-trading system shows that many of them are fake, and many of them are socially unjust.

And over the last week or so it has become clear that, as of right now, the plan is to give away as many as 50%, maybe more, of the permits to burn carbon-based fuels to coal-burning utilities and other carbon emitters. This is truly outrageous.

These two provisions, for “offsets” and for giving free permits to polluters, would completely undercut the on-paper emission reduction targets under the cap of 7% below 1990 levels by 2020 (20% below current levels) and 80% below current levels by 2050. The 2020 reduction target is too low to begin with, conflicting with what the science says is necessary.

What will environmental, climate and progressive groups do about this looming debacle?

Some are working on two tracks. One is to do whatever can be done to mobilize grassroots pressure on House members to significantly correct and strengthen the Waxman committee bill. The other is to support a much simpler, more straightforward, fair and just approach to how we reduce carbon emissions: either a tax (or carbon fee) and dividend (www.carbontax.org) or cap and dividend (www.capanddividend.org). The House Ways and Means Committee has been seriously discussing these alternative approaches for the last couple of months and should be taking them up again when they return this week.

“At the moment, there is heavy pressure from many quarters to abort the Ways and Means Committee’s work. The party line is that two bills would be a distraction, and that everyone needs to get behind the Waxman bill, whatever it turns out to be. In my view, this ‘my way or the highway’ approach is ill-advised. It is too soon to shut down a wider discussion of carbon pricing, and too soon to eliminate alternatives. The time will come when that discussion must end and a choice must be made, but that time is not yet.

“The approaches being considered by the two committees are significantly different. One would create a complex, opaque system that favors politically powerful corporations, the other would create a simple, transparent system that returns higher prices directly to the people. It is a GOOD THING for Congress and the public to know that these two approaches are possible, and to discuss them for a while. Snuffing out that discussion before it happens would be a disservice to the democratic process, and ultimately to finding a durable climate solution.”

This is logical. It is common sense. It is a democratic approach. But the question remains: what will environmental and other groups do this week and next, over the next month? Will they bend to the political science of “Washington,” or will they speak out clearly and act as the climate science is telling us to act?

One way or the other, the decisions they make will be historic. For myself and my fellow fasters, we will be praying in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi that most of them, that most of us, will do the right thing.

More information on the “25-40 fast” and what you can do right now, whether fasting or not, can be found at www.fastingforourfuture.org.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/fast-action-on-climate-change/feed/0Every job can be green, part twohttp://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-two/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-two/#commentsThu, 16 Apr 2009 07:28:20 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-two/]]>This is part two of my chapter, “Green jobs in a sustainable economy”, published recently in the book “Mandate for Change”. You can also read part one, in which I discuss the first three ways in which to create an environmentally sustainable economy.

Fourth, in the United States today, about two-thirds of our electricity and one-third of our natural gas is used within residential and commercial buildings. Heating and cooling accounts for almost all of the natural gas use in commercial and residential buildings, and accounts for 30 percent of all electrical use in the country. And those natural gas and electric bills are going up, threatening to make life miserable for tens of millions of households in winters or summers.

Decreasing the heating and cooling needs of buildings would therefore lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions and lower energy bills. Thus, retrofitting old buildings, making them more energy-efficient, and constructing sustainable buildings will be essential occupations in a green society.

If buildings were able to heat and cool themselves, enough electric generation could be eliminated, and enough natural gas could be diverted into electricity generation, that all coal plants could be shut down. This could be achieved in a number of ways: first, by installing geothermal heat pumps under buildings in order to take care of heating and cooling needs; second, by installing solar photovoltaic systems, for direct electrical heating and cooling, or in order to power the geothermal heat pumps; third, by installing solar thermal units for heating needs; or some combination of the three, which would probably involve battery storage in the building. In other words, to a significant extent, buildings can become energy self-reliant.

Millions of green-collar jobs would be needed for these programs. Within metropolitan areas, low-income neighborhoods can provide much of the labor for turning urban buildings into carbon-neutral structures, as has been mandated in the Green Collar Jobs Bill, which will create a Pathways out of Poverty program. For too long, people from outside low-income areas have been the beneficiaries of construction there, so it is imperative that labor pools hired to create sustainable buildings in low-income areas be filled by the residents of those neighborhoods.

The two roadblocks to self-reliant buildings are financing and skilled labor. An Infrastructure Bank could help overcome both problems. It could follow the lead of the City of Berkeley, which offers loans to homeowners to install solar photovoltaic panels, paying back the loan with the savings from lower electricity bills. The Bank could overcome the second problem by overseeing training institutes for green-collar jobs. Eventually, as in transportation, all building construction jobs could be green-collar jobs.

Fifth, while buildings could provide much of the energy for their own needs, in order to green the energy sector we would need wind- and solar-based electricity generated at the metropolitan level in order to help minimize the use of coal and natural gas. Local electric authorities could establish region-based, medium-sized renewable electrical systems.

Many metropolitan areas have been creating a ,community choice aggregation, or CCA. In a CCA, the metropolitan government uses its power to control the electrical distribution in its territory to contract out the generation of electricity to an energy-service provider (ESP), who is usually required to provide a certain percentage of electricity from solar and wind energy, as well as from conservation. For example, San Francisco is requiring its ESP to provide 103 MW (megawatts) from distributed renewables, mostly PV (solar voltaics) on buildings; 150 MW from a wind farm; and 107 MW from conservation and efficiency. That should constitute 51 percent of San Francisco’s electricity needs.

If CCAs or other kinds of urban electric authorities (such as municipal utilities) spread throughout the country, it would create a perfect opportunity to use labor trained in the metropolitan area to install and maintain the energy systems.

Note that conservation and efficiency can be considered a part of the energy mix, creating a great potential for local employment. A local government could hire thousands of energy auditors to help building owners maximize the energy potential of their buildings. In addition, a “smart grid” can be installed in each region, allowing the local ESP to rationally run or shut down appliances within a building depending on the price of electricity at particular points in time; this will require more service personnel to make sure that the system lives up to its potential.

Sixth, even with building- and metropolitan-based energy systems, the needs of an electrified transportation system would require a national system of solar and wind facilities; in addition, the capability to access electricity from anywhere in the country helps insure that everybody will always have electricity, even if the local sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A National Electric Authority could be established with two main responsibilities: rebuild the national electric grid, and help create large, long-distance concentrated solar power (CSP) and wind farms.

The current national electric grid, which moves electricity from power plants to the industrial, commercial and residential buildings were the electricity is used, is in desperate need of repair. Each piece is owned by a different utility, and the regulatory environment is such that there is little incentive to maintain it, much less upgrade it to the level that will be required to add rich sources of wind and solar energy. In addition, an authority would need to build a system of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines, which would be a more efficient way to move electricity from large-scale renewable energy sources to the rest of the country.

The American Southwest contains enough solar energy potential to supply all of the electricity for the entire country. The Great Plains, such as North Dakota or parts of Texas, likewise contains enough wind power potential to fill all of our current electrical needs, and then some.9 A National Electric Authority could oversee the construction of large-scale CSP, wind farms and the upgrading of the national grid.

The labor trained by the Institutes could help to install and maintain these large-scale systems. The creation of a continent-wide, high-tech electric grid, fed by carbon-free energy sources, would create millions of high-skilled green jobs. In combination with the building and metropolitan energy systems, the energy sector could be transformed from an environmentally damaging industry into a completely green-collar one.

Posted in Business & Technology, Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-two/feed/0Every job can be green, part onehttp://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-one/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-one/#commentsFri, 03 Apr 2009 04:51:43 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-one/]]>Fortunately for your humble correspondent, Van Jones was so busy when the editors of the new book, Mandate for Change: Policies and leadership for 2009 and beyond, were looking for an author for their chapter about green jobs, that they turned to me instead. This is part one of three posts that will serialize my chapter. There are over 40 great contributors besides me, your humble … well, anyway, buy the book!

We face several simultaneous crises—global warming, high oil prices, a brittle agricultural system and a major economic slowdown—all of which can be addressed at the same time by embarking on a program of creating millions of high-quality green collar jobs.

A green-collar jobs program can help create an environmentally and economically sustainable society that: drastically reduces its greenhouse gas emissions; encourages energy independence from oil; eliminates the worry of heating and cooling one’s home; and increases food security, all while providing millions of high-quality, well-paying, long-term jobs, thus bringing millions of people into a stable middle class.

The following eight initiatives could result in transportation, energy, building construction, agricultural and manufacturing sectors that would have very low carbon emissions, would be economically and ecologically sustainable for the foreseeable future, and whose workers and employees would all be green-collar.

Senators Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel introduced a bill in 2007, the National Infrastructure Bank Act [PDF], which is a good starting point for a discussion about how to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Infrastructure funding has been inadequate for decades, and we need an institution that can provide long-term stability of funding.

However, the federal government should go even further and create a bank that also develops human capital. The bank could be called an Infrastructure Capital Development Bank, one that would, in addition to providing funding for infrastructure construction, run a network of Training Institutes that would train the millions of people we need in order to build a sustainable economy. Green-collar jobs need green-collar job classes.

In addition, the Bank could help businesses start up or expand their green-collar activities, with financial help and/or by providing technical assistance. If desired, the Bank could help these firms become employee-owned-and-operated, thus increasing efficiency and insuring that jobs stay in the United States.

Second, our transportation industries are in trouble because the era of cheap oil is over, and at the same time we need to drastically cut our carbon emissions. For inter-city travel, our infrastructure has been built around airplanes, cars and trucks. In much of the world, however, trains of various kinds fulfill the roles of intercity passenger and freight transportation. In the United States, the incoming Administration has a chance to jump-start the construction of a national network of electrified high-speed passenger and freight trains.

At least initially, foreign companies will be the only ones with the expertise to produce high-speed trains. If domestic content legislation was passed, these companies and the hundreds of subcontractors that would be needed for such systems could employ a whole new generation of high-skill blue-collar, or blue-green-collar workers.

High-speed rail is the cutting edge of transportation technology, having been developed even more recently than air travel, much less the 100-year-plus old technology of the internal combustion engine. There are already several federally recognized high-speed rail networks “in waiting,” around Chicago, Ohio, Texas, Florida and California, in addition to the one between Boston and Washington, D.C., which could certainly be expanded.

A national system of high-speed rail could do in the twenty-first century what the Interstate Highway System did for the United States after World War II: create the infrastructure for a period of high-speed economic growth. In addition, if the rail system was powered by solar and wind-generated electricity, the United States would have the first carbon-free inter-city transportation system in the world.

Third, as oil prices increase, so does the demand for public transportation. Subways and light rail can be run on renewable electricity, and commuter rail systems can be expanded and electrified. In addition, many cities are contemplating bus rapid transit, pioneered in Curitaba, Colombia, which allow buses to move much faster and more comfortably.

Currently, as in the case of high-speed rail, there are no domestic primary contractors for subway construction, but in the case of New York State, domestic content laws have led to the establishment of many subway construction factories, and the same could be mandated across the country. Again, these are blue-green-collar jobs, jobs in industry that will help us move toward a zero carbon emission economy, while making us energy independent and more secure.

Another advantage to public transit is that it will encourage the development of dense, “mixed-use” city and town areas, that is, areas that are composed of apartment buildings, stores, offices and other kinds of buildings. Christopher Leinberger of the Brookings Institution calls for the construction of “walkable urbanism” that is, “the development approach that creates pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use and mixed-income places.” When there are fixed subway or light rail stops, then developers, prospective residents and store owners can be confident that there will be fast and easy transportation to any residence or store.

The construction of dense, mixed use buildings near transit stops will bring about a construction boom for decades to come. Building construction or reconstruction, not normally considered “green,” should be so categorized if new construction takes place near transit stops. There are two ways to make buildings “green”—make them energy efficient, and place them in dense areas next to transit stops.

Thus, public transit decreases carbon emissions, helps us achieve energy independence, and lays the groundwork for walkable communities. In addition, staffing, maintaining and building public transit will provide millions of high-quality jobs all across the country. Since the transit and construction jobs will be in urban areas, low-income neighborhoods can be targeted for recruitment into training and apprenticeship programs.

While government can directly create networks of rail and transit, it can also indirectly encourage the replacement of gasoline-only automobiles and trucks with plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles. The first step in this process would be to mandate that all federal cars and trucks be plug-ins or all-electric by 2020. Eventually, if the entire transportation sector can run on renewable electricity, then all jobs in the transportation sector will be green-collar.

Posted in Business & Technology, Politics ]]>http://grist.org/article/every-job-can-be-green-part-one/feed/0The economy needs to be green to be 'fixed'http://grist.org/article/the-big-fix-is-in/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/the-big-fix-is-in/#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2009 21:09:01 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=28178As is often the case, The New York Times serves as a good example of the mistaken assumptions underlying conventional wisdom. In hisSunday Magazine cover story, "The Big Fix," Times economic columnist David Leonhardt combines many of the misconceptions surrounding the idea of "green jobs." As I fretted in a previous post, some writers, including Leonhardt, seem to be setting up some sort of cosmic battle between green jobs, cap-and-trade, and economic growth:

Of the $700 billion we spend each year on energy, more than half stays inside this country. It goes to coal companies or utilities here, not to Iran or Russia. If we begin to use less electricity, those utilities will cut jobs. Just as important, the current, relatively low price of energy allows other companies -- manufacturers, retailers, even white-collar enterprises -- to sell all sorts of things at a profit. Raising that cost would raise the cost of almost everything that businesses do. Some projects that would have been profitable to Boeing, Kroger or Microsoft in the current economy no longer will be. Jobs that would otherwise have been created won't be. As Rob Stavins, a leading environmental economist, says, "Green jobs will, to some degree, displace other jobs."

Later in the article, he kinda sorta argues that this might all be necessary in the long-term .. but first, let's deconstruct his arguments.

]]>As is often the case, The New York Times serves as a good example of the mistaken assumptions underlying conventional wisdom. In hisSunday Magazine cover story, “The Big Fix,” Times economic columnist David Leonhardt combines many of the misconceptions surrounding the idea of “green jobs.” As I fretted in a previous post, some writers, including Leonhardt, seem to be setting up some sort of cosmic battle between green jobs, cap-and-trade, and economic growth:

Of the $700 billion we spend each year on energy, more than half stays inside this country. It goes to coal companies or utilities here, not to Iran or Russia. If we begin to use less electricity, those utilities will cut jobs. Just as important, the current, relatively low price of energy allows other companies — manufacturers, retailers, even white-collar enterprises — to sell all sorts of things at a profit. Raising that cost would raise the cost of almost everything that businesses do. Some projects that would have been profitable to Boeing, Kroger or Microsoft in the current economy no longer will be. Jobs that would otherwise have been created won’t be. As Rob Stavins, a leading environmental economist, says, “Green jobs will, to some degree, displace other jobs.”

Later in the article, he kinda sorta argues that this might all be necessary in the long-term .. but first, let’s deconstruct his arguments.

First, will those poor utilities and coal companies lose jobs? The coal companies will lose a few jobs, but they don’t have many anyway; and for the utilities to lose jobs, there would have to be a massive deconstruction of our electrical system, which is unlikely to happen.

Ironically, Leonhardt spends considerable space in the article talking about one of my favorite books, Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations. To his credit, Leonhardt explains Olson’s theory pretty well — basically, over time, since it’s easier for small groups to organize than larger ones, and since big organizations like big corporations can organize among themselves much more easily than the population at large, the body politic will become “sclerotic.” As in blood vessels, the political system will become gummed up by “special interests” — like coal companies and utilities. So he’s using an example of a malady he’s describing to argue against clean energy investments.

Second, and most central to anti-green rhetoric, electricity bills will allegedly go up, thus jobs and everything else, including economic growth, will go down. There are two ideas being perhaps unfairly intertwined here: cap-and-trade and green collar jobs programs.

Whatever its merits, cap-and-trade need not be linked to green collar jobs. It could be linked — as dirty sources of electricity become as expensive as their true costs would indicate, wind turbines and building retrofitting will become attractive as investments, so cap-and-trade could drive green collar jobs — although for the stimulus, which needs jobs now, now, now, that might take too long.

On the other hand, it should be perfectly possible to create millions of green collar jobs without cap-and-trade legislation. These are actually the green-collar jobs being created in the stimulus package — building retrofitting, subsidies for wind and solar energy, even the pathetic extra funding for mass transit.

Far from making electricity more expensive, the direct public construction of alternative energy systems could conceivably decrease the cost of electricity. At the very least, these green collar stimuli could keep electricity at a similar cost, even as coal plants are ideally being decommissioned. Or, as seems increasingly likely, no new coal plants will be constructed, and the increase in electricity demand could lead indirectly to higher prices, which could be mitigated by some construction of wind and solar electricity-generating systems.

Which leads us to the third fallacy from the Leonhardt’s quote, that green jobs will simply displace other jobs (I’m not giving Stavins an out with his “to some degree” qualifier). Adding wealth by retrofitting buildings, building wind turbines, and creating transit is not "displacing jobs,” it’s adding jobs.

But there’s a bigger problem with this approach, which pops up at the beginning of Leonhardt’s article:

The economy will recover. It won’t recover anytime soon … What will happen once the paddles have been applied and the economy’s heart starts beating again? How should the new American economy be remade? Above all, how fast will it grow?

My hypothesis is this: Unless the economy is making the transition to a green, sustainable, manufacturing-based economy, the economy’s growth will be sporadic and short-lived. In fact, the whole concept of growth will have to be reoriented towards the creation of wealth that does not deplete resources and destroy ecosystems.

In other words, green collar jobs programs are part of a system-wide, long-term response to our economic troubles, not one element in a business-as-usual economic cycle of recession and growth. As David Lindorff argues, “our national economy will never ‘bounce back’ to where it was in 2007.”

Leonhardt does go deeper than the business cycle when he identifies two causes of our current problems: the transformation from an “investment” economy to a “consumption” economy, and the loss of global leadership in education.

When you hear from an economist that we’ve been “consuming” too much, you should be very skeptical. What’s likely to come next is the advice that we have to “tighten our belts.” This sort of belt-tightening talk from economists is supposed to be hard-headed and realistic, as opposed to the soft and fuzzy environmentalist warning to stop using up all of our resources and destroying the biosphere.

But it’s usually a diversion, which really means “big business and the very wealthy need to have whatever resources are left after big business and the very wealthy have led us down the road to economic catastrophe, because only big business and the very wealthy can create jobs.”

In reality, the middle and lower classes have not gained appreciably in the last 30 years, so they are not the ones creating the huge debt that is threatening to drown the economy. And it’s not just consumers buying big TVs on credit that is the problem, its big corporations outsourcing good manufacturing jobs and binging on short-term, Wall Street-inspired financial shenanigans that has led to the lion’s share of our economic problems.

The old economy is not going to come back. We need a new economy, based on a thriving middle class, a green, domestic manufacturing economy, and a rebuilt, green infrastructure. Those would constitute a real “big fix.”

Posted in Article ]]>http://grist.org/article/the-big-fix-is-in/feed/0Government investment in the Midwest will grease the skids for cap-and-tradehttp://grist.org/article/preventing-green-vs-blue/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/preventing-green-vs-blue/#commentsWed, 28 Jan 2009 22:11:54 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=28070The New York Times, in an article entitled, "Geography is dividing Democrats over energy," makes much of an alleged split between policymakers on the coasts, vs. those in the Midwest and Plains states. Somehow coal and manufacturing are grouped together, challenging a concern for global warming:

"There's a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts," said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "It's up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it's cheaper."

Since many, if not most, of my posts attempt to explain why manufacturing and green issues are mutually reinforcing instead of at loggerheads, I find this all very troubling. The problem seems to be that a cap-and-trade policy would make coal more expensive, thus making electricity for manufacturing more expensive. In addition, cap-and-trade might make energy-intensive industries, such as steel and chemicals, more expensive as well.

I think the way to square this circle is to pair cap-and-trade with direct governmental investment to assist coal dependent areas turn to green energy. In other words, if cap-and-trade legislation was passed along with funding to build the wind and solar systems needed to replace the coal plants (and the attendant electrical grid upgrades), then nobody would be worse off. In fact, the Midwest and other manufacturing states would prosper by manufacturing the very wind turbines and solar panels that would be used to replace the coal plants as well as generating any potential on-site solar and wind power. But that would require big bucks from the federal government.

Unless cap-and-trade is accompanied by direct funding for clean energy construction, I'm afraid cap-and-trade will be in big trouble in Congress.

]]>The New York Times, in an article entitled, “Geography is dividing Democrats over energy,” makes much of an alleged split between policymakers on the coasts, vs. those in the Midwest and Plains states. Somehow coal and manufacturing are grouped together, challenging a concern for global warming:

“There’s a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “It’s up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it’s cheaper.”

Since many, if not most, of my posts attempt to explain why manufacturing and green issues are mutually reinforcing instead of at loggerheads, I find this all very troubling. The problem seems to be that a cap-and-trade policy would make coal more expensive, thus making electricity for manufacturing more expensive. In addition, cap-and-trade might make energy-intensive industries, such as steel and chemicals, more expensive as well.

I think the way to square this circle is to pair cap-and-trade with direct governmental investment to assist coal dependent areas turn to green energy. In other words, if cap-and-trade legislation was passed along with funding to build the wind and solar systems needed to replace the coal plants (and the attendant electrical grid upgrades), then nobody would be worse off. In fact, the Midwest and other manufacturing states would prosper by manufacturing the very wind turbines and solar panels that would be used to replace the coal plants as well as generating any potential on-site solar and wind power. But that would require big bucks from the federal government.

Unless cap-and-trade is accompanied by direct funding for clean energy construction, I’m afraid cap-and-trade will be in big trouble in Congress.

Posted in Politics ]]>http://grist.org/article/preventing-green-vs-blue/feed/0A detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use greenhouse-gas emissionshttp://grist.org/article/convenient-facts-about-an-inconvenient-truth-part-2/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/convenient-facts-about-an-inconvenient-truth-part-2/#commentsFri, 16 Jan 2009 01:45:17 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27856Greenhouse gases come in two basic flavors: carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, and emissions from land use -- agriculture, forests, peat bogs, and waste management. Fossil fuels are primarily used for energy in three sectors: buildings, industry, and transportation. Transportation is almost entirely oil-based -- according to the International Energy Association, about 0.1 percent of transportation energy currently comes from electricity.

Just to make things complicated, people use fossil fuels to make electricity to use in buildings and industry. Well, actually, we use fossil fuels to make electricity -- and -- we use fossil fuels to make heat to use in buildings and industry. In my previous post, I presented some pretty exciting tables summarizing this global state of affairs (and the accompanying Google workbook). Now, in part 2, a detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use emissions:

]]>Greenhouse gases come in two basic flavors: carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, and emissions from land use — agriculture, forests, peat bogs, and waste management. Fossil fuels are primarily used for energy in three sectors: buildings, industry, and transportation. Transportation is almost entirely oil-based — according to the International Energy Association, about 0.1 percent of transportation energy currently comes from electricity.

Just to make things complicated, people use fossil fuels to make electricity to use in buildings and industry. Well, actually, we use fossil fuels to make electricity — and — we use fossil fuels to make heat to use in buildings and industry. In my previous post, I presented some pretty exciting tables summarizing this global state of affairs (and the accompanying Google workbook). Now, in part 2, a detailed look at building, industry, transportation, and land-use emissions:

Industry: At 28 percent of all GHGs, industry is the single largest source of emissions. However, there is so much variation in manufacturing and construction — and the data is so hard to collect — that an exact allocation is difficult. The relevant part of the IPCC Industry report [p. 460, PDF]:

iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals, petroleum refining,minerals (cement, lime and glass) and pulp and paper … (ex-petroleum refining) … accounted for 72% of industrial final energy use in 2003. With petroleum refining, the total is about 85%.

Now, when one goes through the rest of the report, it appears that in order to arrive at 85 percent, chemicals must account for over 11 percent of all global GHGs. However, the report advises that no one knows how much the chemical industry emits. But this seems to be the best guess at this point in time.

Concrete is the only industry that seems to produce a major amount of CO2 that does not come from fossil fuels. Steel and aluminum constitute about 4 percent of emissions, but this gives some cause for hope: to produce recycled steel — from scrap — uses only about 40 percent of the energy that making steel from iron requires. And scrap is a bigger and bigger part of global steel production. Recycled aluminum uses only 5 percent of the energy of “virgin” aluminum. In other words, recycling can drastically decrease industrial emissions. The table:

Industry CO2 Emissions

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Fertilizer (ammonia)

500

1.02

Ethylene

180

.37

Chlorine

78

.16

Other Chemicals

4,455

9.09

Concrete

1,650

3.37

Petroleum refining

1,508

3.08

Steel

1,550

3.16

Aluminum

526

1.07

Glass, Ceramics

445

.91

Paper

400

.82

Other

2,601

5.31

Total Industry CO2

11,600

28.35

When we add the methane that is needed to process the fossil fuels used for industry, plus some other gases and losses from fuel-use, we get to 13,893 megatonnes of GHGs.

Buildings: We know the general categories of energy-use in residential and commercial buildings, but the percentages of such usages vary considerably around the world, making it very difficult to determine exact breakdowns. In the following table, “Electricity” is used for appliances, some heating, refrigeration, and cooling; heat of all sorts is used for space heating, cooking, and water-heating:

Buildings Emissions

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Electricity CO2

7,145

14.58

Heat CO2

4,071

8.31

Cooling nonCO2

1,500

3.06

Heating nonCO2

500

1.02

Total Buildings

11,600

28.35

In order to bring these emissions down, we’ll not only need to use carbon-free electricity — and to do more heating from such electricity — but we will also have to decrease the need for electricity by making buildings better able to retain heat and cold. It will be necessary to try to use as much solar heating and ground-source heat pumps as possible.

Transportation: Somehow, we’ll have to find a way to convert transportation from virtually complete dependence on oil to almost complete dependence on electricity. The figures right now:

Transportation Emissions

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Cars, SUVs, light trucks

3,039

6.2

2 wheelers

109

.22

Heavy & medium trucks

1,707

3.49

Air

792

1.62

Shipping

649

1.32

Buses

423

.86

Rail

102

.21

Total Transportation

6,829

13.94

However, just as decreasing industrial emissions should come from decreasing the need for energy, so too transportation emissions should diminish as a result of changing the structure of our living patterns. The denser we can make our residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, and the more we can mix those various functions in a smart way, the less energy required for transportation will be necessary. Plus more walking and biking will replace energy generation. I think that electrified trains will be the most efficient way to move people and freight.

Agriculture: Agricultural greenhouse-gasses are most notable for what they lack: CO2 emissions. Virtually all of the emissions from agriculture come from methane and nitrous oxide because the IPCC assumes that the carbon lost from agriculture is balanced almost exactly by the carbon sequestered in agricultural lands. But what if agricultural regions weren’t being degraded by modern agricultural techniques? According to the IPCC agricultural report [PDF], by 2030, 6,000 megatons of CO2 emissions are preventable provided the soils of the world are built up instead of worn down.

But sticking to methane and nitrous oxide, here is the breakdown for agriculture:

Agriculture Emissions

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Excess Nitrogen from fertilizers

2,318

4.37

Methane from livestock belching and gas, CH4

1,952

3.98

Biomass burning

732

1.49

Rice production

671

1.37

Livestock manure

427

.87

Total Agriculture

6,100

12.45

Notice that organic agriculture could pretty easily remove excess nitrogen from fertilizer. But as far as I can tell, there’s no good way to remove methane emissions from livestock belching (and some gas passing), and if livestock were let loose from those horrible factory farms, it
would actually make it harder to collect the manure. So does this mean that a lifestyle change would be necessary? Could we eat much less meat? Or, eat mostly fish? The latter would mean that to solve the problem of too much livestock, we’ll have to protect the oceans. By saving the ocean’s fisheries we could indirectly prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

Forests: The worst effects of livestock and agriculture may actually be their effects on the world’s forests. According to the IPCC, the amount of emissions from forests is the most difficult to estimate. We also don’t know how much can be attributed to livestock, agricultural clearing, or logging for timber. Here is a table of the loss in forests, by area of the world:

Forest carbon loss

Source

CO2 carbon stock, 2000-2005

% of total forests

South America

-12,833

51.47

Asia

-11,000

44.12

Africa

-5,134

20.59

Rest of World

4,035

-16.18

Global total of forest loss

-24,392

100

Finally, it turns out that waste management contributes almost 3 percent of GHGs — mostly methane from garbage landfills. Again, recycling could eliminate the need for most landfills.

Even without global warming, our energy, transportation, agriculture, and forestry systems are unsustainable. Fossil fuels will eventually become too expensive to use, our agricultural systems destroy the soil, water, and other ecological systems on which they are dependent, and the planet cannot survive without its forests. With the threat of global warming, the need for a revolution of our civilization has never been more necessary.

Posted in Business & Technology, Cities ]]>http://grist.org/article/convenient-facts-about-an-inconvenient-truth-part-2/feed/0Slicing and dicing global greenhouse gas datahttp://grist.org/article/convenient-facts-about-an-inconvenient-truth-part-1/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/convenient-facts-about-an-inconvenient-truth-part-1/#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2009 03:28:33 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27815Say you said to yourself, "Gee, I wish we could prevent global warming." Your next thought might be, "Gosh, where do greenhouse emissions come from?" Well, I asked myself just that question a while back. So I decided to jump into the IPCC Working Group III Assessment Report, and I've posted a Google workbook, called "GreenhouseGasEmissions," which should let you know just about everything you always wanted to know about the global sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The biggest surprise to me was the sheer number of major sources. I don't know whether it would be easier to slay a few big greenhouse gas monsters or a bunch of medium-sized ones, but we're basically stuck with the latter.

Speaking of monsters, according to my calculations, all coal-fired power plants together are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gases (all of these figures are for 2004, in CO2 equivalent megatonnes, from IPCC Working Group III reports, and any errors are mine). Shutting down all coal-fired power plants would decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 18 percent -- but that would still leave 82 percent, and I'm assuming we want to get as close to zero human-made greenhouse gas emissions as possible.

Amazingly, the fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) used to provide heat for buildings and industry are responsible for 21 percent of greenhouse gas emissions -- more than all the coal-fired power plants. In a way, that statistic understates the importance of using carbon-free sources like wind, solar, and geothermal for electricity generation, because if we want to switch transportation from oil to electricity, we will have to replace transportation's oil, responsible for 14 percent of emissions, with electricity sources that do not include the use of fossil fuels. And if we want to eliminate the emissions from heating, we will have to use carbon-free electricity and also redesign/retrofit buildings.

Forests might be some of the cheapest of the "lowest hanging fruit" to save, since they account for almost 16 percent of emissions. But I'm worried about what to do about belching livestock -- how do we get rid of their 4 percent? It might be easier to prevent the 5 percent of all emissions caused by the overuse of nitrogen-based fertilizers.

Before we get into details, however, let's take a stroll through the basics of greenhouse gas accounting.

]]>Say you said to yourself, “Gee, I wish we could prevent global warming.” Your next thought might be, “Gosh, where do greenhouse emissions come from?” Well, I asked myself just that question a while back. So I decided to jump into the IPCC Working Group III Assessment Report, and I’ve posted a Google workbook, called “GreenhouseGasEmissions,” which should let you know just about everything you always wanted to know about the global sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The biggest surprise to me was the sheer number of major sources. I don’t know whether it would be easier to slay a few big greenhouse gas monsters or a bunch of medium-sized ones, but we’re basically stuck with the latter.

Speaking of monsters, according to my calculations, all coal-fired power plants together are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gases (all of these figures are for 2004, in CO2 equivalent megatonnes, from IPCC Working Group III reports, and any errors are mine). Shutting down all coal-fired power plants would decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 18 percent — but that would still leave 82 percent, and I’m assuming we want to get as close to zero human-made greenhouse gas emissions as possible.

Amazingly, the fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) used to provide heat for buildings and industry are responsible for 21 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — more than all the coal-fired power plants. In a way, that statistic understates the importance of using carbon-free sources like wind, solar, and geothermal for electricity generation, because if we want to switch transportation from oil to electricity, we will have to replace transportation’s oil, responsible for 14 percent of emissions, with electricity sources that do not include the use of fossil fuels. And if we want to eliminate the emissions from heating, we will have to use carbon-free electricity and also redesign/retrofit buildings.

Forests might be some of the cheapest of the “lowest hanging fruit” to save, since they account for almost 16 percent of emissions. But I’m worried about what to do about belching livestock — how do we get rid of their 4 percent? It might be easier to prevent the 5 percent of all emissions caused by the overuse of nitrogen-based fertilizers.

Before we get into details, however, let’s take a stroll through the basics of greenhouse gas accounting.

There are various ways to look at the sources of greenhouse gas emissions, depending on the problem in which you are interested. The variation comes from the fact that fossil fuels are used to generate electricity, which is used for buildings and industry, and fossil fuels are also used directly in buildings, industry, and transportation. So is it important to know: the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that fossil fuels emit? What the generation of electricity emits? Or what buildings or industry emit? It depends on what you’re interested in at the time.

Let’s start with my recalculation of a pie chart that the IPCC uses ([PDF], p.105), which separates electricity as a source of GHGs from each sector (you can see the following three tables at the top of the “Summary and Energy” tab in my workbook):

Table 1. Electricity separated

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Electricity

11,215

22.84

Buildings

5,515

11.23

Industry + ff processing

10,851

22.09

Transportation

6468

13.17

Agriculture

6,100

12.42

Deforestation

5,800

11.81

Other forests

18.62

3.79

Waste Mgmt

1,300

2.65

What this table means is that buildings emit 11 percent of GHGs before considering the electricity they use; industry, 22 percent. If we want to take the full account of GHG emissions for buildings, for industry, and the tiny bit for transportation, then we have to present a table that allocates electricity among buildings and industry (and the tiny bit for transport):

Table 2. Electricity allocated to sectors

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Buildings

13,215

26.97

Industry

13,893

28.35

Transportation

6,829

13.94

Agriculture

6,100

12.42

Deforestation

5,800

11.81

Other forests

18.62

3.79

Waste Mgmt

1,300

2.65

Notice that the last four entries didn’t change at all, because they don’t use electricity. These four I’ll call land use sources of emissions. Now, let’s say we want to know the responsibility of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in our oncoming climate nightmare:

Table 3. Fossil fuels separated

Source

CO2 eq Mt

% of total

Coal CO2

10,600

21.63

Oil CO2

10,200

20.82

Natural gas CO2

5,300

10.82

Buildings

2,000

4.08

Industry

2,130

4.35

Agriculture

6,100

12.42

Deforestation

5,800

11.81

Other forests

18.62

3.79

Waste Mgmt

1,300

2.65

Methane from fossil fuel processing

3,071

6.27

Transportation nonCO2

636

1.30

Notice how buildings can be held responsible for 11 percent of total GHG emissions if electricity is separated out, up to 27 percent if electricity emissions are allotted to the final destination, and down to 4 percent if all fossil fuels are taken out (that last 4 percent is mostly gases from air conditioning, by the way). The decision about which to use depends on the question: What if we wanted to make all buildings zero emissions, that is, totally self-reliant for energy plus nonpolluting? Then use the 27 percent figure. What would we be left with if all fossil fuels were replaced with carbon-free sources? Use the 4 percent figure for buildings. And so on, for all sectors.

In part two, I’ll go through more details concerning the various main sectors. In the meantime, if you are so inclined, you can look at the “Details” tab of my workbook.

A note about sources: There are basically four sources of data from the IPCC for GHG emissions. First, there is a wonderful flowchart ([PDF], p. 259) from the International Energy Administration that shows the sources of energy and the final categories of use. Second, there are a few pie charts in the Introduction chapter of the Working Group III report ([PDF], p.103-5). Third, spread throughout the various chapters of the WG III assessment report are various pieces of data. Finally, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency maintains a database called Edgar that is used throughout the
IPCC reports.

However, these sources do not seem to match up exactly. Much of this is inherent to one problem: It is very difficult to estimate, over the entire globe, what humans are doing to emit greenhouse gases, and as the "Forestry" chapter explains, this is particularly a problem with forests (and to a lesser extent agriculture — energy use seems to be much easier to keep track of). However, the exact numbers are not important; what is important is to get some sense of the relative importance of various sectors, to know what sectors are involved, and ultimately, to solve the problem by eliminating virtually all GHG emissions.

Posted in Article ]]>http://grist.org/article/convenient-facts-about-an-inconvenient-truth-part-1/feed/0How the U.S. and China can help, not harm, each otherhttp://grist.org/article/the-de-greening-of-america-and-china/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/the-de-greening-of-america-and-china/#commentsSun, 28 Dec 2008 02:20:53 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27591]]>So this is how it worked: Instead of greening our manufacturing base, amping up our recycling system, and competing on the basis of better production technology, we shipped our production to China, which is busy polluting itself and spewing carbon dioxide. In return, the Chinese took the hundreds of billions from sales to the U.S. and reinvested the money here, helping to make our sprawl even spawlier and our military even more wasteful.

In the 19th century, the United States built its railroads with capital borrowed from the British … But Americans did not use the lower-cost money afforded by Chinese investment to build a 21st-century equivalent of the railroads. Instead, the government engaged in a costly war in Iraq, and consumers used loose credit to buy sport utility vehicles and larger homes. Banks and investors, eagerly seeking higher interest rates in this easy-money environment, created risky new securities like collateralized debt obligations.

So China and the U.S. are caught in a death spiral — well, maybe that’s too strong a phrase. By undercutting our manufacturers, in the long run the Chinese are destroying the very market that they are selling to. But they are terrified of upsetting the model that is “working” in China, creating the world’s biggest middle class and decreasing pressure for democratization. Meanwhile, the Americans desperately need the savings from China in order to keep the economic system afloat, and need to import cheap goods for the formerly well-employed working class.

This would be called colonialism, or imperialism, on the part of the U.S. if the U.S. owned China: they send us their goods for very little in exchange, in effect. And like all empires, we are concentrating on destruction and consumption, not production.

The rational solution for China, which the U.S. and Chinese governments have been trying to sell to the Chinese public, is to spend some of their own money at home instead of saving so much of it, creating pressure to park the saved money somewhere — like in the U.S. However, as the article states:

Chinese save with the same zeal that, until recently, Americans spent. Shorn of the social safety net of the old Communist state, they squirrel away money to pay for hospital visits, housing, or retirement.

In other words, it seems to me, the Chinese could solve this problem by providing the population with a safety net, with a national health system, social security system, and unemployment benefits. And then they could even buy U.S. goods and services.

The rational solution for the U.S. is to create a green manufacturing base, one that will employ millions in well-paying, high-skill jobs, instead of relying on financial shenanigans and real estate. As Michael Hudson has argued, higher prices for already-existing things does not add wealth to the economy; only creating goods and services adds wealth to the economy. And in order to avoid climate change, ecosystem destruction, and resource exhaustion, an entirely new production infrastructure needs to be put in place. And then the Chinese would have someone to sell to, and they might be able to get their ecological act together.

Posted in Business & Technology ]]>http://grist.org/article/the-de-greening-of-america-and-china/feed/0The economy is an ecosystem, and industrial policy will help that ecosystemhttp://grist.org/article/time-for-a-green-industrial-policy/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/time-for-a-green-industrial-policy/#commentsWed, 24 Dec 2008 00:58:14 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27557]]>Back in the 1980s, writers such as Robert Reich were advocating what was called an “industrial policy” — that is, the government should intervene in the economy and explicitly help a particular industry or set of industries in order to make them more competitive.

Yes, I know this sounds like “picking winners,” except that governments have been doing this successfully for hundreds of years. Consider it as the equivalent of the Park Service being stewards of a national park, intervening when necessary to keep the ecosystem healthy. Now, think of the economy as an ecosystem, and think of industrial policy as a way to keep the economy healthy.

American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S. dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700 billion at America’s wounded banks is also an industrial policy.

So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the industries of the next century such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in return?

We need to move in this direction anyway; think of it as the “public investment” part of the public investment, regulation, and carbon-pricing three-legged stool of climate-change mitigation policy. And it is probably the only way we’re going to turn around the American economy. The economy is the ecosystem, and ecosystem is the economy.

Posted in Article ]]>http://grist.org/article/time-for-a-green-industrial-policy/feed/0Michael Moore on the Big Three and transithttp://grist.org/article/notable-quotable101/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/notable-quotable101/#commentsTue, 09 Dec 2008 04:23:12 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27244]]>“Transporting Americans is and should be one of the most important functions our government must address. And because we are facing a massive economic, energy and environmental crisis, the new president and Congress must do what Franklin Roosevelt did when he was faced with a crisis (and ordered the auto industry to stop building cars and instead build tanks and planes): The Big 3 are, from this point forward, to build only cars that are not primarily dependent on oil and, more importantly to build trains, buses, subways and light rail (a corresponding public works project across the country will build the rail lines and tracks). This will not only save jobs, but create millions of new ones.”

Posted in Article ]]>http://grist.org/article/notable-quotable101/feed/0Biogas out of … can’t sayhttp://grist.org/article/one-little-piggy-went-to-the-electricity-market/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/one-little-piggy-went-to-the-electricity-market/#commentsFri, 05 Dec 2008 07:24:19 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27182]]>Here’s an example from the New York Times of turning doo-doo into gold:

At the electricity-from-manure project here in Sterksel [Netherlands], the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural gas within, which is burned to generate heat and electricity.

The farm uses 25 percent of the electricity, and the rest is sold to a local power provider. The leftover mineral slurry is an ideal fertilizer that reduces the use of chemical fertilizers, whose production releases a heavy dose of carbon dioxide.

For this farm the scheme has provided a substantial payback: By reducing its emissions, it has been able to sell carbon credits on European markets. It makes money by selling electricity. It gets free fertilizer.

What I don’t quite understand is why, if farmers get all of these benefits, they are still fretting that this process will raise the price of their meat products.

The article also talks about how meat consumption will double by 2050 (Earth to humans: yowch!), and how emissions from livestock (up to 18 percent of total global emissions) should be included in carbon trading schemes.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/one-little-piggy-went-to-the-electricity-market/feed/0James Hansen’s recent post on climate changehttp://grist.org/article/juggling-two-disasters-at-once/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/juggling-two-disasters-at-once/#commentsTue, 25 Nov 2008 06:55:50 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=27029]]>James Hansen recently posted a new letter on climate change called “Tell Barack Obama the Truth — The Whole Truth” [PDF] on his website. In it, he lays out many of his ideas on how to avert climate catastrophe, and I will cherry-pick a few quotes here:

A carbon cap that slows emissions of CO2 does not help, because of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2. In fact, the cap exacerbates the problem if it allows coal emissions to continue. The only solution is to target a (large) portion of the fossil fuel reserves to be left in the ground or used in a way such that the CO2 can be captured and safely sequestered.

In other words, if I read him correctly, he’s arguing that bringing down coal emissions to anything above zero is not going to work. We’re talking a total ban on coal emissions.

So far so good, in my opinion, but I just want to point out an omission that Hansen makes — he doesn’t tackle the problem of making transportation electric. His take on transportation:

Oil is used primarily in vehicles, where it is impractical to capture CO2 emerging from tailpipes. The large pools of oil remaining in the ground are spread among many countries. The United States, which once had some of the large pools, has already exploited its largest recoverable reserves. Given this fact, it is unrealistic to think that Russia and Middle East countries will decide to leave their oil in the ground.

The problem is this: If we haven’t moved to electric transportation (cars, trains, buses, trucks — forget about planes) by the time the oil runs out, humanity will probably start to use even more sources of CO2, such as shale, tar sands, coal to liquids, and destroy what’s left of the carbon-sequestering soil by producing ethanol.

Hansen presents an interesting graph, shown at right, which indicates that if coal phases out by 2030,land use (forests and agriculture) stops contributing to the problem, and transportation fuels stop contributing to the problem, then we may be able to avert catastrophe. Hansen has discussed reforesting and building up soils to take care of the land use problem, but he has not talked about electric transportation. And that’s my 2-cents worth: electrified transportation is also a critical part of the solution.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/juggling-two-disasters-at-once/feed/0hansen graphTo save themselves, the Big Three should become ‘transportmakers’http://grist.org/article/what-goes-around-comes-around1/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/what-goes-around-comes-around1/#commentsTue, 18 Nov 2008 07:21:49 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26882]]>Irony of ironies, the one set of products that could save GM is the one that GM destroyed — the electric trolley systems of America. According to the well-known research of Bradford Snell, GM killed the electric trolley, because in 1922 they decided that the only way to increase car sales was to eliminate the competition — decent public transit. So they bought systems, pressured railroads and banks, bought public officials, did whatever they could to replace electric — I’ll repeat that, electric — transportation with oil-based transportation.

Irony number one — if the U.S. had a set of decent electric public transit systems, the demand for oil would be much lower, and the car companies (and the rest of the economy) would not be in so much trouble. Irony number two, of course, is that the car companies have also been busy killing the electric car.

But the biggest irony may be that the Big Three could be revived by building a new generation of electric trolleys, or light rail, or high-speed trains, or electric bus rapid transit. As Paul Goodman wrote in the New York Times:

The Obama administration should ask the companies, as a condition of financial assistance, to begin shifting from being just automakers to becoming innovative “transportmakers” … As transportmakers, the companies could produce vehicles for high-speed train and bus systems that would improve our travel options, reduce global warming, conserve energy, minimize accidents and generally improve the way we live.

Harvey Wasserman argues that “GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered.” That should certainly be part of an agreement that the Federal government makes if it is to grant GM, Ford, and Chrysler a large loan (EconomistPopulist has been running an excellent series on the situation). But as Louis Uchitelle shows in an article in the New York Times about the automobile industry, the market for cars may be declining in the United States:

In an industry capable of making 17 million cars a year, sales have dropped to an annual rate of only 10 million vehicles made here.

“None of the Big Three — and perhaps not the transplants [i.e., foreign car companies] — can make money at 10 million,” Mr. Luria said. “The transplants are O.K. at 12 million and the Big Three at 15 million or so.”

Annual sales of autos and light trucks have been at least 15 million through most of the last decade.

I’m not optimistic that Washington, D.C. or the Obama Administration will suddenly understand that the main reason we are dependent on foreign oil — and so incredibly vulnerable to the effects of rising oil prices — is because we don’t have a decent electric alternative within our transportation system. But it would certainly be history’s sweet revenge if the industry that did so much to give us an unsustainable society became part of the solution to our environmental and economic woes.

Posted in Cities ]]>http://grist.org/article/what-goes-around-comes-around1/feed/0Cut defense spending in favor of clean-energy investinghttp://grist.org/article/pssst-its-ok-to-cut-the-defense-budget/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/pssst-its-ok-to-cut-the-defense-budget/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2008 14:07:19 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26821]]>Conventional wisdom, that dour specter, seems to be saying we don’t have enough money to fix many of our biggest problems, such as global warming or shifting to carbon-free energy. But wait! The Pentagon itself has determined that there are plenty of resources that the Defense Department could do without, according to the Boston Globe:

A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department’s current budget is “not sustainable,” and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military’s most prized weapons programs … Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.

After years of unfettered growth in military budgets, Defense Department planners, top commanders and weapons manufacturers now say they are almost certain that the financial meltdown will have a serious impact on future Pentagon spending.

But what could possibly be more important for our long-term national security than building a healthy economy and preventing Florida from going under water? Below the fold, some logic on why our national security would be stronger in the long-term if the military budget was seriously cut back now.

History provides a very straightforward lesson: Those countries that can amass the largest pool of industrial resources are the countries that can build the largest militaries. For instance, the United States produced at least 40 percent of the world’s manufactured goods before World War II and had one of the world’s smallest armies, yet it was able to create the world’s largest military because of its factories (the classic explanation of this point is the subject of the book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy).

The Soviet Union also built up one of the world’s largest military establishments, but it used its manufacturing capacity mostly to produce military machinery, instead of renewing the factories that made its military equipment possible. The same process is threatening the U.S. In the long-run, if the manufacturing system in the U.S. becomes so anemic that it can’t even be used to rebuild itself, the U.S. military (and economy) will slip into second-class status.

The current implosion of the automobile industry is a symptom of this trend. Without the help of a thriving manufacturing ecosystem, even with competent management, the car companies would be hard pressed to compete with national manufacturing systems such as those that exist in Germany and Japan. Those countries are not burdened by a huge military establishments and a corporate elite who are enthusiastically dismantling the manufacturing capacity of the nation.

We have a deteriorating manufacturing capacity in addition to a bloated military establishment. And on top of all this, the entire energy infrastructure needs to be replaced. The fossil-fuel economy is doomed: Oil and natural gas will become more and more difficult to find, and even the U.S. coal supply is limited. In addition, if we don’t want to lose Florida and New York City, if we don’t want America’s breadbasket to turn into the Great Midwestern Desert, if we don’t want Death Valley to engulf the entire Southwest, then we’d better stop using fossil fuels and prevent climate change.

So let’s say we took several hundred billion dollars annually out of the military budget and directed that money toward the construction of a vast, modern smart electrical grid, a high-speed rail network, and a national wind farm system that would provide baseload electrical power [PDF]. If all of these systems were made in the U.S., the industrial ecosystem that has been so recently clearcut could be regrown. And with a thriving industrial system based on clean, renewable energy, with a geographically stable country, then we would have the capability to rebuild a dominant military system, if that should ever become necessary again.

In other words, a green, manufacturing-centered economy would mean energy independence, economic independence, and no need for a future Declaration of Independence.

And that’s why our long-term national security depends on cutting the military budget now.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/pssst-its-ok-to-cut-the-defense-budget/feed/0A real path to energy independencehttp://grist.org/article/high-speed-rail-wins-in-california/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/high-speed-rail-wins-in-california/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2008 07:28:11 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26683]]>Proposition 1A passed 53 percent to 47 percent in California on Tuesday. The network will eventually extend from Sacramento through San Francisco and L.A., to San Diego.

The bonds authorized by the proposition provide for about $10 billion or one-third of the cost for the whole system. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California, said:

Voting for bond measures like high-speed rail was an opportunity for voters to say, “Well, there is something we can do.” It pointed out just how desperately Californians feel we need to make investments in the future. For it to pass at this time even by a narrow margin I think says a lot, because it was a big price tag.

Now maybe Obama will consider funding high-speed rail for the Midwest, which has been creeping along for years now. High-speed rail should be a crucial part of a plan for energy independence.

Posted in Politics ]]>http://grist.org/article/high-speed-rail-wins-in-california/feed/0New Mother Jones piece flaunts climate starpower, but lacks practical suggestionshttp://grist.org/article/save-the-planet-now-how-do-we-do-that/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/save-the-planet-now-how-do-we-do-that/#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2008 08:17:11 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26466]]>Magazines like to tease their readers with headlines that promise answers to seemingly intractable problems. Such seems to be the intent of the lead story of the December 2008 issue of Mother Jones, entitled “How to rescue the economy and save the planet.” Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz hold forth, among others, but I thought that David Roberts, in his article about green jobs, and Mark Schapiro, in his piece about Europe, offered the most concrete ideas about what governments can do — and that, after all, should be our focus.

Al Gore and Bill McKibben made clear the “urgency of now,” but failed, I think, to explain how we can cooperatively act as a society in the face of that urgency. Gore argues:

We are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits, and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes … The survival of the United States as we know it is at risk. And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.

Bill McKibben persuasively argues that we must move towards 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and we are now at around 380, which “means that we’ve got to transform the world’s economy far more quickly than we’d hoped.” Put Gore and McKibben together, and it seems to me that they are describing an emergency — and if this is an emergency, then we need some massive government-financed construction programs.

Now, Gore calls for a carbon-free electrical system in 10 years, and McKibben calls for a moratorium on coal plants, a cap on carbon, and an international agreement to implement the first two. As McKibben points out, “These are three of the hardest tasks we’ve even thought about since we took on Hitler.” Earth knows, these two gentlemen have done a lot more than your humble blogger to advance these programs, so I offer my own even harder tasks in the spirit of constructive criticism.

We are now witnessing a shift to a new paradigm, one in which it’s OK to “throw off old habits,” like bashing government, and to consider the “necessity of big changes,” like using the government to engage in, say, the following trillion-dollar-a-year crash program:

create a national network of local, organic, soil-building farming belts around urban areas, which would eliminate the massive carbon release of the current agricultural system and create a sustainable, healthy society;

This new manufacturing economy would have green jobs and blue-green jobs — let’s call them turquoise jobs. Our Fearless Leader, Dave Roberts, points out in the article “The Truth about Green Jobs,” “If the U.S. wants green manufacturing jobs, it will have to develop industrial policy to keep them here.” Jobs for solar and wind energy will create more jobs than the dirty jobs they replace. Investing in building efficiency would be paid back in three years. Wind turbines need as many parts as cars, and we need training for these green jobs, which could lift millions out of poverty.

And where would the money for all of this come from?

As Joseph Stiglitz points out in his article, “The Seven Deadly Deficits,”

There are only two ways to pay for these investments: raise taxes or cut other expenditures. Upper income Americans can well afford to pay higher taxes … [we have] but one major area in which to cut [spending] — defense … With so much money spent on weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist, there is ample room to increase security at the same time that we cut defense expenditures.

And in “Let’s Go Europe,” Mark Schapiro shows how Europe has actually gotten part of the way there (Note to China: follow Europe, not the U.S.):

[The European] Union has banned substances known to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive problems from an array of consumer goods. It has mandated that materials in most packing, electroincis and even automobiles be recyclable; demanded that manufacturers disclose toxicity data on tens of thousands of chemicals; and imposed increasingly stringent energy standards on businesses and individuals.

The European regulation cost much less than expected, led to world-class exporting industries, and laid the foundation for a clean technology boom. Hey, sounds like a plan — and that’s not such a bad thing. After all, this is what John McCain said in response to a question on Meet the Press about the huge financial bailout: “The role of government is to intervene when a nation is in crisis.” And boy do we have plenty of crises!

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/save-the-planet-now-how-do-we-do-that/feed/0Lester Brown talks about renewable energy expansionhttp://grist.org/article/the-great-growth-industry-of-the-21st-century/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/the-great-growth-industry-of-the-21st-century/#commentsFri, 17 Oct 2008 05:32:17 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26236]]>On a conference call Wednesday, I asked Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, whether the recent financial meltdown would effect the burgeoning solar, wind, and geothermal industries. He responded that while investment of all kinds will be more difficult, a renewable energy jobs program could provide the same kind of stimulus that the Works Projects Administration did in the 1930s if we slip into a deep recession or even a depression. But beyond that, it seems clear from his view of the current energy scene, that renewable energy will be “The great growth industry of the 21st century,” as he put it, even out-performing the information revolution of the 1990s.

Lester presented quite a bit of evidence to back up his claim — you can see his summary here and the background data here.

Brown thinks that we are moving toward a society that is largely powered by green electricity. In fact, he thinks that transportation can be powered primarily from green electricity as well via plug-in hybrids, high-speed intercity trains, and light rail. He pointed out that while the 20th century mainly saw the globalization of energy, particularly in the case of oil, the 21st century will see the localization of energy in the form of electricity generated from local wind, solar, and geothermal sources.

So what do we need to accelerate this renewable expansion even further? Brown laid out a few big ideas: first, extending the tax credits which went into the bailout bill; second, pushing for a shift of most of the 230 million car fleet to plug-in hybrids, both through programs to junk gas guzzlers and to encourage buying plug-ins; third, developing a national grid, in an effort that would be similar to the one that built the Interstate Highway System; and fourth, using this transition as a way to provide millions of new jobs, both for renewable energy and for efficiency.

I asked Brown if intermittency problems could be overcome — that is, the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t always shine. Brown cited research done at Stanford University which concluded that, if a national grid with nationally distributed wind farms were fully developed, it would in effect act like baseload capacity, that is, there would always be enough electricity being generated somewhere to fill most immediate needs.

He also pointed out that nuclear power plants have their own intermittency problems — there were over 50 shutdowns last year alone — and no one is advocating building backup nuclear power plants. A national grid with a large number of well-distributed electricity generators is constantly experiencing changes in capacity, no matter what the source.

Brown also suggested that we have not begun to use advances in information technology to manage consumer demand. For instance, we should be able to allow people to do their laundry when electricity is cheapest. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal asked if it will be a problem to use eminent domain to create the corridors necessary for long transmission lines, and Brown said that that could be a problem, but those were overcome during the construction of the Interstate Highway System and could be in this case as well. The reporter also asked whether the decline in oil prices will impact the clean energy expansion; Brown feels that the long-term rise of oil prices in inevitable, and price volatility of oil is high, so wind and solar expansion will not be interrupted by oil price declines, unlike in the past.

Brown ended by relating the story of the legal case of a Greenpeace protest in the U.K., in which the protesters were arrested for preventing the construction of a coal-fired power plant. They were found innocent, because the judge found that just as firefighters are not liable for knocking down a door to fight a fire, people are justified in creating some damage in order to prevent even greater damage to the planet.

Renewable energy is absolutely critical to the long-term functioning of both the biosphere and the global economy. If we do the right thing, we will move as quickly as possible from a fossil fuel-based civilization to one built on wind, solar, and geothermal. This move is not a lost cost, it is an investment, a critical investment, more important than our current financial bailout.

Posted in Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/the-great-growth-industry-of-the-21st-century/feed/0How modern cities made themselves livablehttp://grist.org/article/the-eco-beginnings-of-modern-government/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/the-eco-beginnings-of-modern-government/#commentsTue, 14 Oct 2008 05:45:38 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26167]]>Financial deregulation has obviously been a disaster. Perhaps we are entering a new era, one in which it is acceptable to talk about the positive actions that governments can take. A friend of mine, Bryn Barnard, has written about how government first stepped in to provide a minimally healthy environment — in a chapter about cholera in his bookOutbreak: Plagues that changed history, and in a chapter about the Great Fire of London in his book,Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters that changed history. He recently put his thoughts together to write the following about Britain in the 1830s.

—–

Taxes were low, the successful could pass on their estates pretty much intact to their heirs. A fraction of the population controlled most of the wealth. They had immaculate estates, but beyond their gates, the streets were potholed and awash with offal. Most services were private: water supply, fire protection, waste removal.

The problem with this system is that neither fire nor germs care whether one is rich or poor. Fire companies would only put out fires in the houses of their well-off insured, and with multiple competing fire companies, many conflagrations that could have been prevented were not. Fire prevention came to be considered a public good, the private companies were collectivized into the London municipal fire departments.

Water was also private then. London had five separate competing water companies. A single block could have each house with a different supplier. Some of these suppliers were getting their water from downriver, where the Thames was mostly sewage, and waterborne disease was rampant. Eventually the repeated waves of cholera that swept through London from the 1830s on (six in all) were traced to water. Cholera didn’t distinguish between rich and poor, successful or indolent. Like the law, with majestic equality, it killed everyone. Clean water came to be seen as a public good. The water supply was collectivized. That was bad for that era’s Culligan man, who, had he had the terminology probably would have railed against socialism, but with a single municipal water supply, health improved.

The man who championed public projects municipal water, improved sewers, clean paved streets for all classes was Edwin Chadwick, a government bureaucrat. He was castigated by members of Parliament for promoting “mawkish philanthropy.” But cholera and the host of other communicable diseases that killed the average poor person by 20, the middle class person by 35 and even the rich man by 45 proved a compelling convincer that a society provides services to everyone, rich and poor benefit.

The welfare state starts here. Several Health and Sanitation Acts were passed in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. These eventually included public housing an improved public education, public parks and so on. Britain didn’t become a welfare state because rich people there are kindly bleeding hearts. They did so for selfish self interest. In a welfare state, they lived longer, better, and healthier. They still do.

My question is: do we want absolute freedom for freedom’s sake or do we want freedom leavened with some protections — protections made possible by taxation — that keep us collectively safer, healthier, stronger and that make life better for everyone, rich and poor? History suggests that when those services mentioned above and many others are delivered privately and competitively, the quality of life declines.

Is it better to be rich and keep all your money but die from a communicable disease, or pony up money for a public health system that you never use, but insures that the society whose air you breathe and water you drink is healthier? One could argue that perfect freedom makes for a perfect society, where we are each individual boats bobbing on the waves completely responsible for our own fates, but the historical evidence suggests otherwise.

Posted in Living ]]>http://grist.org/article/the-eco-beginnings-of-modern-government/feed/0The whole economy needs to be green collarhttp://grist.org/article/its-the-jobs-stupid/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/its-the-jobs-stupid/#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2008 02:18:56 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26087]]>Bob Herbert lays out a strong argument for a focus on jobs in his column “A Fool’s Paradise”:

The economy won’t be saved by bailing out Wall Street and waiting for that day that never comes when the benefits trickle down to ordinary Americans. It won’t be saved until we get serious about putting vast numbers of Americans back to work in jobs that are reasonably secure and pay a sustaining wage … we need to find the money and the will to put Americans to work rebuilding the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure, revitalizing its public school system, [and] creating a new dawn of energy self-sufficiency

And none of that will happen unless we rebuild the manufacturing sector at the same time. As I have argued before, a country can’t trade services for goods. In order to be rich, a country must make most of its own goods. But in addition, most of the wealth of an economy comes, directly or indirectly, through the manufacturing ecosystem.

Van Jones has laid out a vision to create a green collar sector of the economy, one that can employ millions of people. I think that the kinds of jobs he discusses — retrofitting buildings, installing photovoltaics — is the first stage in greening the entire economy.

The first part of a green collar economy is the “low hanging fruit” of the basic services, such as retrofits and installation. But the second part is to actually manufacture the things being serviced — the photovoltaics, the insulation. The third part, perhaps, is to create entirely new systems that are both produced and serviced by people in green collar jobs — systems such as high-speed electric rail or large wind farms.

The fourth stage, then, might be to weave all of these systems together, so that, for instance, the high-speed rail is powered by the large wind farms, or the photovoltaics provide electricity for the grid, or thousands of people are employed to tear down old coal plants and to revive the ecosystems that the coal plants destroyed.

If we think of green collar jobs as reviving the foundations of the economy, then the response to the argument, “Greening the economy and solving the climate crisis will cost too much money” can be replaced with the argument, “The only way to save the economy is to green it.”

Posted in Article ]]>http://grist.org/article/its-the-jobs-stupid/feed/0Why more government now means less in the futurehttp://grist.org/article/penny-dumb-pound-dumber/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/penny-dumb-pound-dumber/#commentsTue, 07 Oct 2008 02:09:25 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=26034]]>“Socialism!” the House Republicans cried when the financial bailout was proposed — and they were right, if you define socialism as the takeover of part of the economy by the government. We’ll be in for much more of this sort of thing if the House Republicans and the rest of the federal government keeps worshiping at the altar of the “free market.” Here’s the lesson of the financial mess we’re in: A free market with no regulations leads to socialism, as presently defined.

Well, doggone it, we have a bunch of huge problems that need regulation and public investment, or else we’ll be headin’ for some more socialism. You betcha!

As global warming leads to more Katrinas and Ikes, not to mention more droughts and crop failures, we’ll head closer and closer to a permanent state of central planning. As oil becomes more expensive and more scarce, and suburbia continues to stick its collective head firmly in the sand, then much more government intervention will be needed to bail out large parts of the society. We’ll have socialism by necessity, not by choice.

There is a point beyond which even re-regulating the economy won’t fix the problem. We may not be beyond that point in the financial system, although time will tell. But in order to solve the global warming and peak oil problems, we’re going to have to go beyond carbon pricing — the market-based solution — and even regulation. We’ll have to use a hefty dose of public investment too (I’m using Gar Lipow’s “carbon pricing, regulation, public investment” troika here, although as usual he is not responsible for the way I might mangle his idea).

Now that the Reagan revolution has had its financial Reign of Terror, perhaps it will be possible to talk about using government funds to build a decent public transit network, a high-speed rail system that is at least as comprehensive as the Interstate Highway System, a reliable national electrical grid, urban residential developments, and to invest public funds in a renewable energy system.

Intervention in the energy infrastructure could be accomplished by using subsidies for renewable energy, as the Europeans do. It could even involve re-municipal-izing the electricity system, and giving cities and towns the resources to install photovoltaics on every building and wind farms in every neighborhood. But those sorts of ideas are so far beyond the current ideological environment, no serious environmental organization would even consider them.

And that brings us back to the House Republicans. Think about how the debate would move in a more progressive direction if there was a solid progressive majority in Congress. When the League of Conservation Voters identified the original Congressional “Dirty Dozen” in 1970, and most of them were defeated, the rest of Congress got the message and passed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and several other important pieces of legislation. Perhaps a few more “Dirty Dozens” need to go down.

The lessons of the unregulated markets before WWII were understood by some important thinkers of that time. Karl Polanyi, in his book The Great Transformation, argued that free market capitalism just about destroyed itself without regulation. Joseph Schumpeter came up with the phrase “creative destruction” to describe the vibrant process of capitalism — but in the same book in which he coined the phrase that is endlessly repeated by pundits, he also pessimistically predicted that socialism would triumph over capitalism because capitalism would creatively destroy itself.

Ironically, the people who most want to defend the purity of the free market are the ones most likely to destroy capitalism. By preventing government from intervening democratically, rationally, and with long-term systemic perspective, the House Republicans and their fellow travelers are checkmating the actions that the market needs in order to survive and thrive. We need to be penny-wise — by passing the necessary regulations and carbon pricing — and pound-wise, by publicly investing in a green transformation of the economy.

Posted in Climate & Energy, Politics ]]>http://grist.org/article/penny-dumb-pound-dumber/feed/0Why the party that wrecked America can’t fix ithttp://grist.org/article/mccaint/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_jonrynn
http://grist.org/article/mccaint/#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2008 05:28:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=25909]]>The Republican party has a problem. They have based much of their power, over the last several decades, on the idea of ever-expanding (almost exclusively white) suburbs. The thinking was, as those suburbs become less and less dense — as one wag put it, the further away the houses are from each other — the more those suburbanites will vote Republican. As William Levitt, the builder of the first modern suburb after World War II said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist.”

Now that strategy is stalling, and I have a feeling that it will soon go into reverse. As James Howard Kunstler and others have argued, the mortgage meltdown is not simply the result of a a non-regulated financial system gone wild, but also the last gasp of growth of an automobile-and-oil-centered society. McCain couldn’t possibly solve the climate change or peak oil or industrial agriculture or ecosystem destruction problems, because these all require a greater efficiency of resource and energy use, which means a move towards a more urban lifestyle and the contraction of the Republican base. McCain simply won’t do it — exhibit A, he wants to kill Amtrak.

How did the Republican party get into this box?

The Republican party won the Civil War, and to the victors go the spoils. Not only did they become cozy with the emerging industrial behemoths of the period, but they also demanded fealty in return. The Republicans, however, had a long-term problem then, too — the base of the Democratic party, at least outside the South, consisted of the political machines that controlled the burgeoning cities (much of this history is based on the books of Walter Karp).

Since most of the population was rural, it didn’t pose much of a problem to the Republicans. When the territories of the Great Plains were ready for statehood, the Republicans figured that the more states the merrier, even though the region was sparsely populated. Instead of one Dakota, why not two? Then the Republicans would still have a head-start in the Electoral College and Congress.

As the Republicans tightened their claim as the Ruling Party, the Democratic machines, happy to continue their hold on the cities, stuck around on the national scene in case the Ruling Party messed up so badly that people wanted to throw the bums out (sound familiar?). But the last time we had an unregulated financial system, in the 1920s, it led to a great number of progressive social and political movements. Partly because of their pressure, FDR belatedly put together some of the parts of a social democratic society, such as old-age insurance and support for labor unions, that most European countries had by the 1920s.

What was a ruling party to do? It certainly helped that in 1952 Dwight Eisenhower became the first Republican president since the reviled Herbert “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” Hoover. Eisenhower had participated in the first transcontinental convoy of trucks in the 1920s, and then very competently led the large-scale invasion of Europe during WWII. Although he famously warned about the pitfalls of the military-industrial complex, he helped birth it, and he also presided over the creation of the Interstate Highway System without which the suburbanization of the U.S. would not have been possible.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Levitt and many others started to construct suburbia, which allowed for a partial emptying out of the cities, containing by this time most of the population. This rush to one’s own “home sweet home” looked very tempting, considering that the so-called Highway Lobby, made up of the oil, car, highway-building, and real estate interests of the country, had worked to destroy what had been a world-class public transit system.

With buses and the remnants of the old-time Democratic party machines clogging up the cities, the American Dream emerged — a bigger car and a bigger single family house, placed within a bigger sprawl. The road to ecological and economic ruin had begun.

Socialism was firmly planted within the U.S. government in the form of a huge military budget, so the Federal government was able to effect a massive transfer of wealth from the “old” North and Midwest to the “new” South and Southwest, where mavericks and pioneers like Ronald Reagan and John McCain came from. And the vast subsidization of home ownership, in the form of the mortgage deduction and the laying of roads and other suburban infrastructure, led to a revived ruling Republican Party of Suburbia.

By now the vast majority of Americans can’t even conceive of living without an automobile, and they assume that a big single family house is the best place to raise a family. By 2006 of 124 million household units (table 951) [PDF], 77 million were single family detached, 7 million single family attached, and only 15 million households lived in buildings of 10 or more units.

The recent binge of house-building and mortgage-taking was the ultimate expression of this long-term process, and even though the Democratic Party basically went along, in typical fashion, the new exurbia was expected to be solidly Republican. I’m not saying that this was a Republican conspiracy — it was the final expression of a century-long trend, and the Republicans were waiting to benefit from it. This is why their legislators, and some of their constituents, almost shake with anger when the idea of the expansion of public transit is brought up — such a move threatens to make cities more livable, and urban residents seem to be more progressive and vote more Democratic.

While I appreciate the efforts of Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and some environmentalists to be bipartisan, this analysis suggests that the effort is doomed to failure, unless some parts of the Republican party accept the inevitable — that oil will soon become too expensive for everyday use, that climate change will bring too much disruption, that cities make more sense than sprawl, that manufacturing, and the unions which thrive within it, must be rebuilt. Then we can reconstruct the country in a bipartisan way, but not before. The Republicans, as presently constituted, are incapable of changing their wrecking ways.